Associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny have accused Russian billionaire Leonid Nevzlin of ordering a hammer attack on the former chairman of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Leonid Volkov, in Vilnius earlier this year.
Volkov was attacked on the evening of 12 March near his home in the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania, leaving him with a broken arm and leg injuries. Three men were arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack in Poland the following month.
In a video investigation published on Thursday, Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), alleged that a “fixer” named Andrey Matus approached the FBK in July claiming to have evidence linking Leonid Nevzlin, a close ally of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to the attack on Volkov, as well as to other less serious attacks on Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov and Alexandra Petrachkova, the wife of Russian economist and activist Maxim Mironov.
Matus, who said he had worked for Khodorkovsky for three years, sent the FBK never-before-seen videos shot from the attackers’ perspective during the attack on Petrachkova in Argentina and when Zhdanov was pelted with eggs during a public event in Geneva.
Matus also showed Signal messages between a man whose contact name appeared as Leonid Nevzlin and a person planning the attack on Volkov in Vilnius. The attacker allegedly planned to beat Volkov up and then “transport” him to Russia, where he would be prosecuted for his ties to Navalny, whose three organisations have been classified as “extremist” in Russia.
The message history was independently analysed by Christo Grozev, the former lead Russia researcher at Bellingcat, and Mikhail Maglov, who works for Russian investigative outlet Proekt, Pevchikh said, both of whom came to the conclusion that it was unlikely to have been falsified.
Volkov and Zhdanov then arranged a meeting with Matus in Montenegro, where he played them an audio recording of a phone conversation he had with Nevzlin in which they discussed the attack on Volkov. According to Pevchikh, Nevzlin was unhappy with the result and refused to pay the organisers the agreed sum of $250,000.
While the phone call, which Zhdanov and Volkov recorded without Matus’s knowledge, could not be verified fully, Pevchikh points out that the man in the phone call has the same speech patterns and the same voice as Nevzlin.
Pevchikh added that the FBK had notified “the law enforcement agencies of the countries that Leonid Nevzlin visits” and signalled their readiness to hand over all existing evidence and to testify in court.
“Leonid Nevzlin should be arrested and brought before an independent court for organising the kidnapping and attempted murder of Leonid Volkov and for organising the attacks on Petrachkova and Zhdanov,” Pevchikh said.
Responding to the FBK’s accusations on Thursday, Nevzlin denied he had anything “to do with any assault on people, in any form”, adding that he saw “no point” in discussing the details of what he described as a “so-called ‘leak’ organised by Moscow”.
Demanding an independent investigation into the claims and, if necessary, “a court in a democratic country” to assess the authenticity of the materials seen by the FBK, Nevzlin wrote:
“I am convinced that justice will confirm the absurdity and complete untenability of the accusations against me.”
Khodorkovsky also responded to the accusations on Thursday, saying: “Either it is true and then Leonid Nevzlin has gone mad. Or it is a FSB provocation and a fake that someone spent a lot of money on. … For some reason, Maria Pevchikh is confident that it is the former.”
Khodorkovsky called Nevzlin his “business partner, ally and friend of many years”, but said that the pair had taken “separate political paths”. He stressed that he considered the attacks “heinous offences” that should be “thoroughly investigated”, but noted that if the FBK wants to accuse him of something, “they can go to court” instead of “slyly shitting” on his reputation.
Nevzlin, the former co-owner of Khodorkovsky’s oil company Yukos, emigrated from Russia to Israel in 2003, the same year Khodorkovsky was arrested on tax evasion charges. A prominent Putin critic, Nevzlin renounced his Russian citizenship shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and is now a citizen of Israel.
On 6 September, six days before Navalny’s team published their investigation, Russian propaganda channel RT published an investigation into the same leaked message history that they said was provided to them by Anatoly Blinov, a man named as one of the organisers of the attack on Volkov by the FBK.