Even with his swollen face and bruised forehead, Leonid Volkov tried to smile grimly. “They tried to make a steak out of me. A man attacked me with a steak hammer,” Leonid Volkov explained on his Telegram channel last night.
The evening before, Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny’s former chief of staff, survived a brutal beating attack in front of his home in a suburb of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. The unknown attacker smashed the window of the car in which Volkov was sitting, sprayed pepper spray into his face and hit him with the hammer. Volkov, 43, sustained numerous bruises and flesh wounds in the fight and broke his right arm. It is still unclear whether the Kremlin is actually behind the attack.
However, many exile activists blame the Russian secret services. “We are dealing with a war by Putin against the entire political system of the West,” says opposition historian Andrej Zubov, who has been teaching at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, since 2022. “One aspect of this war is the effort to silence Russian emigration.” Up to a million Russians are said to have left the country after February 24, 2022, including thousands of opposition activists, humanities scholars and journalists.
Poison attack in Prague
The human rights activist Natalja Arno noticed a strange smell in her hotel room during a stay in Prague in May 2023, after which she suffered from symptoms of poisoning; American doctors later confirmed that she had been poisoned with neurotoxic agents. These are still isolated cases, but they certainly have a tradition. The Soviet secret services were already hunting down emigrants loyal to the Tsar in the 1920s. “Traitors” and “enemies of the people” were also kidnapped or murdered later: from Lev Trotsky, who was killed in Mexico in 1940, to the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned in London in 2006, to the Chechen ex-guerrilla Selimchan Changoshvili, who was shot dead in Berlin in 2019.
But beating attacks were almost always carried out only within the country, as an alternative to criminal proceedings or compulsory psychiatric treatment. “In Russia, like in Soviet times, they can get away with anything,” Zubov says of the secret service agents. “But in the West they are threatened with being arrested themselves.” That’s why they always used “surefire” means so as not to take any risks in vain.
Navalny aide Volkov fears that things could get even worse. According to the exile portal meduza.io, just a few hours before the attack in Vilnius, he spoke in an interview about possible attacks against the escaped comrades-in-arms of Navalny, who died in a northern Siberian prison camp at the end of February. “The key risk is that they will kill us all.”
