It was a crude and violent assault, but as a bloody message, it was chillingly effective. An attacker ambushed Leonid Volkov, a close adviser to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Nalvany, outside his home on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania. The time was 10.06pm on Tuesday night as he arrived, after having filmed an anti-Putin video in time for this weekend’s election.
The assailant smashed open the car window and blasted Volkov with teargas, and repeatedly struck him with a hammer – about 15 times – breaking his left arm and bloodying his left leg before fleeing the scene. It was, Volkov said in the aftermath, “an obvious, characteristic, typical, gangster-style greeting from Putin” and the assault reflected an emerging truth: Russian intelligence operations in Europe are back.
