TALLINN, Estonia (AP) – Officials of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny said late Tuesday that his close ally and top strategist was attacked near his home in the Lithuanian capital.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s former press secretary, said the assailants broke the window of Leonid Volkov’s car, sprayed tear gas in his eyes and began beating him with a hammer. Mr. Volkov was then taken to the hospital, Mr. Navalny’s ally Ivan Zhdanov said.
Alexei Navalny’s death deals a huge blow to Russia’s political opposition
The attack occurred in Vilnius nearly a month after Navalny died of unknown causes in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle. President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest critic was serving a 19-year prison sentence there for extremism charges widely seen as politically motivated.
Russia’s Leonid Volkov, chief of staff for Alexei Navalny’s campaign in the 2018 presidential election, looks on at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, on December 15, 2021. Officials of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny reported this on Tuesday night. A top strategist and close aide to a politician was attacked near his home in Lithuania. Navalny’s press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, said the assailants broke the window of Leonid Volkov’s car, sprayed tear gas in his eyes and began beating him with a hammer.
Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and Russia’s best-known opposition politician, returned to Moscow in 2021 after recuperating in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin, saying he could definitely be arrested. He had been imprisoned since March. That same year, his anti-corruption foundation and network of regional offices were designated by the Russian government as an “extremist organization.”
His death, reported by prison officials on February 16, shocked the world, with opposition groups and Western leaders shifting the blame to the Kremlin, a charge vehemently rejected by authorities in Moscow.
Thousands of supporters gathered for the politician’s funeral in Moscow on March 1, an unprecedented show of defiance in Putin’s Russia, which continues to brutally crack down on dissidents. People wanting to pay their respects to Navalny, 47, continued to stream to his grave in southeast Moscow for days after the ceremony. Navalny’s widow Yulia has vowed to continue her late husband’s work.
Mr. Volkov previously ran Mr. Navalny’s regional office and campaign. Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013 and sought to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential election. Volkov left Russia several years ago under pressure from the authorities.
Last year, Volkov and his team launched a project called “Navalny’s Campaign Machine” to talk to as many Russians as possible by phone and online ahead of the March 15-17 presidential election. The goal was to turn them against President Putin.
Shortly before his death, Navalny called on his supporters to gather at noon on Sunday, the last day of voting, to show their dissatisfaction with the Kremlin. In recent weeks, his allies have been aggressively pursuing a strategy known as “noon versus Putin.”
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Russian independent news outlet Meduza said it interviewed Volkov hours before the attack and asked him about the risks to Navalny’s team. “The key risk is that we will all be killed,” Meduza quoted Volkov as saying.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said on X (formerly Twitter) that the news of Volkov’s attack was “shocking” and stressed that “the perpetrators must be held accountable for their crimes.”
