FRANCE 24 spoke to Leonid Volkov, former chief of staff to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. On March 12, Volkov was assaulted in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, where he has lived in exile since 2019. "I was attacked by someone with a hammer in the dark in front of my house," Volkov said, explaining that he was left with a badly injured leg and broken hand. "It's very clear for me that [the attack] has been an order from [the] Kremlin", he added, saying that "every evidence that I have shows this". The Russian dissident also explained that he receives online threats "pretty much daily".
Volkov, 43, spoke to FRANCE 24 almost two months after Alexei Navalny's death in an Arctic penal colony and just over three weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin was unsurprisingly re-elected with 87.28% of the vote, according to official results.
Asked whether Putin was now comfortably in power, fresh from his re-election and with his main opponents dead, jailed or in exile, Volkov insisted that politics was "like a pendulum" and that Putin would soon see "significant resistance" to a new wave of mobilisation for Russia's war in Ukraine.
For Navalny's close ally and his team, the "political fight against Putin was always a marathon".
"And we were always ready [for] this marathon. And so is Yulia, Alexei's wife. And so is the entire team that Alexei has built over the last years," Volkov said.
Read moreNavalny ally Leonid Volkov assaulted outside his home in Lithuania
