The Lithuanian police declared this Wednesday that they have opened an investigation into the attack suffered by Leonid Volkov, 43, a former assistant to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after being attacked on Tuesday outside his home in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Lithuania.
Volkov was attacked with tear gas and a hammer.
The dissident returned to his house this Wednesday after receiving treatment in the hospital for a broken arm, as he stated in a message on the Telegram social network.
“We will work and we will not give up,” said Volkov, Navalny's former campaign manager in the 2018 presidential elections, in a video published on Telegram early this Wednesday.
“They wanted to beat me with a meat hammer.
A man attacked me in the yard, hitting me on the leg about 15 times.
For some reason, the leg is fine, it hurts when I walk, but there is no fracture.
However, my arm is broken,” he added after emphasizing that the attack was a “greeting from Putin with the characteristic greeting of the gangsters of St. Petersburg (city of origin of the Russian president).”
Volkov could barely see what was happening.
The dissident, who was also head of staff at Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund, only remembers seeing one aggressor.
His wife, however, believes she saw two attackers from the window.
Lithuanian police stated that no suspect has yet been identified.
Several police units, including the elite anti-terrorist unit, investigated the crime scene near Volkov's home on the northern outskirts of the Lithuanian capital overnight.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabrielius Landsbergis, described the event as shocking on Tuesday and stated that the perpetrators must “answer for their crime.”
Image provided by dissident Alexei Navalny's entourage on his Telegram channel, where Leonid Volkov is seen on a stretcher after being attacked near his home in Vilnius, on March 12, 2024.AP
The Department of State Security in Lithuania indicated in a statement as “probable” the fact that the attack was “organized and executed” by Russia, with the aim of “stopping the execution of the Russian opposition's projects in relation to the upcoming undemocratic presidential elections in Russia.”
The Russians are called to the polls between March 15 and 17, in elections in which everyone assumes that Putin will be re-elected and renew his mandate until 2030. The Lithuanian Security Department maintains that the Kremlin considers the Fund Against Corruption, the organization founded by Navalni, as “the most dangerous opposition force capable of exerting real influence on Russia's internal processes.”
For his part, the Lithuanian president, Gitanas Nauseda, has indicated that the attack was clearly planned in advance and joins other provocations against the Baltic nation.
Addressing Vladimir Putin, Nauseda warned: “I can only say one thing to Putin: no one is afraid of you here.”
Volkov was one of the closest opponents of dissident Alexei Navalny and has lived outside Russia since 2019.
Navalny died at the age of 47 on February 16 in circumstances that have never been clarified in a remote penal colony in Siberia.
He had previously survived several attacks, including a very serious poisoning in the summer of 2020 in Siberia by the Russian secret services.
“It is not necessary for Putin to give the order”
Another colleague of the activist, Iván Zhdanov, director of the Anti-Corruption Fund, has warned of the risk his followers run.
“After Navalny's murder they will persecute those who left the Russian Federation.
It is not even necessary for the Kremlin to give the order, the different criminal groups that surround Putin will try to gain his favor and show who is the best," the opponent has declared on his social networks.
The leader of the Russian ultranationalist organization
Mudzhkoye Gosudartsvo
—
Male State
or
Male State
, however it is translated — took credit for the action, although his claim has not been verified.
“Volkov was screwed by our subscribers, they followed him for a long time,” said Vladislav Pozdnyakov on his Telegram channel, which has almost half a million followers.
The head of this far-right organization—supposedly banned after being declared extremist by the authorities for its harassment of women and the non-Slavic population—accompanied his message with some alleged screenshots of the opponent's car license plate.
In September 2020, while Navalny lay in a coma due to poisoning, Volkov gave an interview to this newspaper where he claimed that Putin was behind the assassination attempt.
When asked if he was afraid of being next on the list, Volkov replied: “We don't know what that list looks like, or if it exists.
No one who is active in the political opposition in Russia can feel safe, but I always thought, and I even talked about it with Alexei, that if they decided to kill someone, his lieutenants, people like me would be natural targets.
Because the damage to the organization would be the same, but there would be no international reaction because we are not as famous as him.”
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