Leonid Volkov, a long-time ally of the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, was attacked by unknown assailants with a hammer outside his home in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Tuesday evening, Navalny’s team reported.
Navalny’s press secretary Kira Yarmysh first reported the incident late on Tuesday, saying that the window of Volkov’s car had been broken outside his home, and an attacker had “sprayed tear gas in his eyes and started beating Leonid with a hammer”.
In a video posted to his Telegram channel after hospital treatment early on Wednesday, Volkov said the attacker had hit him in the leg “about 15 times” with a meat tenderiser and broken his arm in an attempt to “make a cutlet out of me”.
Leonid Volkov at the European Parliament in Brussels, 28 September 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE / STEPHANIE LECOCQ
“It was such an obvious, typical, characteristic gangster greeting from Putin from gangster St. Petersburg”, Volkov continued, stressing that he and other Navalny associates would “keep working and won’t give up”.
According to Lithuanian news outlet Delfi, police confirmed an incident had taken place just after 10 pm local time on Tuesday evening. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted that the authorities were investigating the “shocking” assault and that its “perpetrators will have to answer for their crime”.
Russian opposition journalist Sergey Parkhomenko noted that Volkov lives in a quiet area on the outskirts of Vilnius, and suggested the attack was premeditated rather than the work of a “random street thug or robber”.
Far-right Russian blogger Vladislav Pozdnyakov, who used to head the banned nationalist group Male State, claimed that his supporters were behind the attack on Volkov, though this could not be verified.
