Russian opponent Leonid Volkov, former right-hand man of Alexei Navalny and now in exile, was attacked with hammer blows on Tuesday night in front of his house in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The Lithuanian government described the attack, which caused the activist to break his arm, as “shocking.”
“They broke the car window with a hammer and sprayed tear gas in his eyes, after which the attacker began to hit Leonid with a hammer,” wrote Kira Yármish, Navalny’s former spokesperson, on the social network X.
According to the Lithuanian police, the attack took place at ten pm on Tuesday (nine pm in Barcelona).
Yármish posted photos showing broken car glass as well as bruises on Volkov’s face. An ambulance came to the opponent’s aid, and then he received medical attention at a hospital.
Volkov specified this Wednesday that the attacker was a man and that he hit him “about 15 times” with a blunt object, which was the cause of the fracture. “They literally wanted to transform me into a schnitzel (schnitzel).” he added on Telegram before congratulating himself for still being “alive.”
43-year-old Leonid Volkov is one of the best-known figures of the Russian opposition in exile and was one of the lieutenants of the prominent opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
The hammer attack occurred almost a month after Navalni’s death, which occurred on February 16 in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic, where he was serving three decades in prison for several sentences that he and his followers considered invented to separate him from the fight. against Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
It also happened on the eve of the presidential elections that Putin will undoubtedly win by a large majority. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Naválnaya, also exiled, last week asked her compatriots to use the elections to show her rejection of Putin, as her husband had proposed.
Picking up Navalny’s idea, he asked Russians to vote on March 17 at noon and to give their vote to anyone other than the current Russian president. In addition to Putin, three candidates are running: Leonid Slutski, leader of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party; Nikolai Kharitonov, for the Communist Party; and Vladislav Davankov, from Gente Nueva.
According to Leonid Volkov, the aggression he suffered is “typical” of the way Putin’s men act. But he will not be dissuaded from continuing to fight for democracy in Russia. “We are going to continue working and we will not give up,” he remarked in a video published on Telegram.
The Foreign Minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, condemned in X the “shocking” attack against Volkov and assured that the perpetrators must “answer for their crimes.” The Baltic Republic of Lithuania, a member country of NATO and the European Union, has welcomed numerous Russian opponents and is one of the countries that has been most determined to support Ukraine since Russian troops entered the country recently. of two years.
