The Russian oppositionist Leonid Volkov, former right-hand man of Aleksei Navalni and today in exile, was assaulted with hammer blows by an unknown person on Tuesday night in front of his home in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The activist assured yesterday that the fight against Putin will continue and the Lithuanian president, Gitanas Nauseda, who held the Russian leader responsible, assured that “no one is afraid of him”.
“They broke the window of his car with a hammer and sprayed tear gas in his eyes, and then the attacker began to attack Leonid with a hammer,” wrote Kira Iarmix, Navalny’s spokesperson, on the X social network .
According to the Lithuanian police, the attack took place at ten o’clock on Tuesday night (nine o’clock at night in Barcelona). Iarmix posted photos showing a broken car window as well as bruises on Volkov’s face. An ambulance appeared to help the opponent, and then he received medical attention in a hospital.
Vólkov specified yesterday that the attacker had been a man and that he had assaulted him “about 15 times”, most of which in the leg, although he ended up breaking an arm. “They wanted to literally transform me into a Schnitzel (escalope)”, 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 prominent opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.
The hammer attack took place almost a month after Navalny’s death, which was on February 16 in a penal colony in the Russian Arctic, where he was serving three decades in prison for various convictions that he and the his followers considered invented to separate him from the fight against Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
It has also taken place on the eve of the presidential elections, which will undoubtedly be won by Putin by a large majority. Lithuania’s State Security Department’s counterintelligence agency said yesterday that the attack, likely “organized by Russia,” had been carried out to force the opposition to stop influencing the election.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, also in exile, last week called on her compatriots to use the election to show their rejection of Putin, as her husband had proposed. Picking up on Navalny’s idea, he asked Russians to vote on March 17 at noon and to cast their vote for anyone other than the current Russian president. In addition to Putin, three candidates are presented: Leonid Slutski, leader of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party; Nikolai Kharitonov, from the Communist Party, and Vladislav Davankov, from Gent Nova.
The Lithuanian agency said the Kremlin sees Navalny’s team as “the most dangerous opposition force capable of exerting influence on Russian internal processes.”
According to Vólkov, the aggression he suffered is the “typical” way Putin’s men act. But they will not dissuade him from continuing to fight for democracy in Russia. “We continue to work and we will not give up”, he remarked in a video published on Telegram.
The Baltic republic of Lithuania, a member of NATO and the European Union, has hosted numerous Russian and Belarusian dissidents and is one of the countries most determined to support Ukraine since Russian troops invaded the country last year. just over two years.
The Lithuanian president, Nauseda, said from Paris that “no one is afraid” of Putin, and assured that the Lithuanian authorities “will evaluate, investigate and, I hope, find the guilty”.
