"We won't give up." Thus Leonid Volkov, Alexei Navalny's right-hand man and great personal friend who was attacked with a hammer yesterday in Lithuania. “We will work and we will not give up,” he wrote on Telegram, adding that the attack, which resulted in a broken arm, was a “characteristic bandit salute” by Putin's associates.
First they broke the window of his car, then they sprayed stinging liquid in his eyes and hit him with hammers: this is how he was attacked in front of his house in Lithuania. Kira Yarmysh, the spokeswoman for the Russian dissident, who died just under a month ago in unclear conditions in an isolated prison in the Siberian tundra beyond the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter, denounced the intimidation.
Volkov, 43, a great friend of Navalny and head of staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation set up by Navalny until March 2023, openly blamed Vladimir Putin for his friend's death . Only three days before that dramatic February 16, speaking from abroad with some diplomats in Moscow, Volkov had said that Navalny was "in surprisingly good psychophysical condition" and not in danger of his life , despite the very harsh prison conditions beyond the Arctic Circle. in the middle of winter, thus strengthening the hypothesis that he did not die because he was ill or worn out.
On February 22, in a hearing at the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, he then asked for a tougher response from the Western world to the death of his friend and dissident , underlining that the Russians "laugh" at the sanctions recently imposed by Great Britain on six staff members of the penal colony where Navalny was held. If you really want to hurt Moscow, he suggested, you need to hit "Putin's friends" by seizing their assets. "We produced a list of 6 thousand people, now 7 thousand, illustrating the regime's collaborators, and still nothing has happened."
(Unioneonline/D)
