The Lithuanian police declared this Wednesday that they have opened an investigation into the attack suffered by Leonid Volkov, 43, a former assistant to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, after being attacked on Tuesday outside his home in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Lithuania. Volkov was attacked with tear gas and a hammer. The dissident returned to his house this Wednesday after receiving treatment in the hospital for a broken arm, as he stated in a message on the Telegram social network.
“We will work and we will not give up,” he said in a video published on Telegram early this Wednesday, collected by the newspaper The Guardian. He claimed the attack was a “characteristic bandit salute” by Russian President Vladimir Putin's henchmen. “The man attacked me in the yard, he hit me on the leg about 15 times. The leg is fine. It hurts when I walk… However, I broke my arm,” Volkov said.
Lithuanian police stated that no suspect has yet been identified. Several police units, including the elite anti-terrorist unit, investigated the crime scene near Volkov's home on the northern outskirts of the Lithuanian capital overnight. The Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gabrielius Landsbergis, described the event as shocking on Tuesday and stated that the perpetrators must “answer for their crime.”
For his part, the Lithuanian president, Gitanas Nauseda, has indicated that the attack was clearly planned in advance and joins other provocations against the Baltic nation. Addressing Vladimir Putin, Nauseda warned: “I can only say one thing to Putin: no one is afraid of you here.”
Volkov was the right-hand man of dissident Alexei Navalny and has been living outside Russia since 2019. Navalny died at the age of 47 on February 16 in circumstances that have never been clarified in a remote penal colony in Siberia. Navalny had survived several attacks, including a very serious poisoning in the summer of 2020 in Siberia by the Russian secret services.
In September 2020, while Navalny lay in a coma due to poisoning, Volkov gave an interview to this newspaper where he claimed that Putin was behind the assassination attempt. When asked if he was afraid of being next on the list, Volkov replied: “We don't know what that list looks like, or if it exists. No one who is active in the political opposition in Russia can feel safe, but I always thought, and I even talked about it with Alexei, that if they decided to kill someone, his lieutenants, people like me would be natural targets. Because the damage to the organization would be the same, but there would be no international reaction because we are not as famous as him.”
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
Subscribe
Follow all the international information on Facebook y Xor our weekly newsletter.