Navalny ally hospitalized in brutal attack
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA • A close associate of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “henchmen” on Wednesday of being behind a brutal attack that left him hospitalized.
Police said an assailant attacked Leonid Volkov on Tuesday as he arrived in a car at his Vilnius home, where he lives in exile. The attacker smashed one of his car’s windows, sprayed tear gas into his eyes and hit him with a hammer, police said.
Volkov suffered a broken arm “and for now he cannot walk because of the severe bruising from the hammer blows,” according to Navalny’s The Anti-corruption Foundation.
He was hospitalized, but later released, and vowed to keep up his work.
“We will work, we will not give up,” 43-year-old Volkov said in a short video posted on Telegram on Wednesday, speaking with his arm bandaged and in a sling.
“It was a characteristic bandit greeting from Putin’s henchmen.”
This seemed to be a reference to both Putin’s thuggish style and his stint as a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s when it was considered one of the most criminal cities in Russia.
Police have launched a criminal investigation.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister, called the attack “shocking.” He wrote on X: “Perpetrators will have to answer for their crime.”
The attack took place nearly a month after Navalny’s unexplained death in a remote Arctic penal colony. He was Russia’s best-known opposition figure and Putin’s fiercest critic. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021 and was serving a 19-year prison term there on the charges widely seen as politically motivated.
Opposition figures and Western leaders laid the blame on the Kremlin for his death.