- Leonid Volkov was attacked by tear fuel and a hammer exterior his house in March
- Navalny’s high strategist stated there was ‘nobody magic trick’ to topple Putin
An exiled ally of Alexei Navalny has vowed to ‘by no means quit’ preventing Vladimir Putin to make sure the late Russian opposition chief’s sacrifice is ‘not in useless’.
Leonid Volkov, who was talking after a horrific hammer and tear fuel assault exterior his Lithuania house in March, described his good friend’s demise as an ‘open wound in our hearts’.
Navalny died on the age of 47 in an Arctic jail camp in February.
Volkov insisted there was ‘nobody magic trick’ to topple Putin however referred to as on Ukraine’s Western allies to ship extra weapons to the entrance line and never contemplate negotiating with the Russian chief.
He instructed the BBC: ‘If there are 50 issues we are able to do, we now have to do all 50 of them, should you do 49, that’s not sufficient, as a result of that’s the best menace to the world that we’ve seen in 80 years.’
Navalny’s aide accepted there was ‘no substitution’ for the late politician however that his spouse Yulia Navalnaya was thought of by ‘everyone’ as the brand new ‘charismatic’ chief of the opposition motion.
Click on right here to resize this module
Volkov added that Navalnaya had not needed to be seen because the inheritor to her husband, who many allies, branded extremists by authorities, consider was murdered by Putin.
On the Russian chief, Volkov identified that he had no boundaries and was killing folks throughout the continent, on the entrance line and even in Russia.
He added that Putin’s current shows of energy had been a entrance and he urged Western leaders to not be fooled by it.
The assault on Volkov’s house in Vilnius, Lithuania, passed off on March 12 and noticed an assailant smash a window of his automotive, spray tear fuel into his eyes and begin hitting him with a hammer, in keeping with Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh.
Images of Volkov’s accidents revealed he suffered a black eye, a pink mark on his brow and bleeding on his leg, which had soaked by means of his denims.
The opposition determine claimed that the message behind the assault on his property had been that his enemies knew the place he was they usually might hurt him in the event that they needed to.
Volkov was an in depth ally of Navalny, working because the late chief’s ex-chief of employees and as chair of his Anti-Corruption Basis till 2023.
Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow to face sure arrest after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin.
Click on right here to resize this module
His Basis for Combating Corruption and his regional workplaces had been designated as ‘extremist organisations’ by the Russian authorities that very same yr.
Volkov was once in command of the regional workplaces. He left Russia underneath stress from the authorities.
Navalny’s demise, reported by penitentiary officers on Feb. 16, despatched shockwaves across the globe.
Russian authorities say Navalny died within the Arctic jail of pure causes, however his spouse Yulia Navalnaya has accused Putin of getting him killed – an accusation the Kremlin vehemently rejects.
Just lately US intelligence backed up Putin’s claims, figuring out that the Russian President most likely did not order the opposition politician to be killed, the Wall Road Journal reported final month.
The Journal stated Washington had not absolved the Russian chief of general accountability for Navalny’s demise nonetheless, given the opposition politician had been focused by Russian authorities for years, jailed on prices the West stated had been politically motivated, and had been poisoned in 2020 with a nerve agent.
The Kremlin denies state involvement within the 2020 poisoning.
Reuters couldn’t independently confirm the Journal report, which cited sources as saying the discovering had been ‘broadly accepted throughout the intelligence group and shared by a number of businesses, together with the Central Intelligence Company, the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence, and the State Departmentâs intelligence unit.’
The U.S. evaluation was based mostly on a variety of data, together with some categorised intelligence, and an evaluation of public information, together with the timing of Navalny’s demise and the way it overshadowed Putinâs re-election in March, the paper cited a few of its sources as saying.
It cited Volkov as calling the U.S. findings naive and ridiculous.