For months, the employees of the late Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny believed {that a} grotesque assault in Lithuania in opposition to the dissident’s former high aide was the work of Kremlin thugs.
However after investigating the assault in opposition to Leonid Volkov they dropped a bombshell: they now believed the boys who used hammers to beat up Navalny’s ex-chief of employees had been employed by one other Russian dissident.
The neighborhood of activists and politicians that makes up the Russian opposition overseas has all the time been susceptible to infighting. However it’s the first time that Navalny’s influential Anti-Corruption Basis has accused a supposed ally within the battle in opposition to the Kremlin of ordering a violent assault on one in all their very own.
In a video, seen 1.3mn instances because it was posted on-line late final week, Navalny’s aides accused the rich businessman and outspoken Kremlin critic Leonid Nevzlin of hiring two Polish males to beat up Volkov outdoors his residence — and of being motivated by a dispute over political opinions.
They base their claims on what they are saying are screenshots of personal conversations on the Sign messaging app between Nevzlin and a shady fixer. Nevzlin is alleged to have ordered the assault on Volkov and to have steered he could also be left “wheelchair-bound” or then “delivered” again to Russia, the place he would almost definitely be jailed.
“Time to put off the fool,” reads one of many messages, which the Navalny staff claims was written by Nevzlin. The chat contains a number of covertly shot pictures of Volkov and different Navalny staff members going about their every day lives in Vilnius. A number of the covert pictures incorrectly recognized them and their houses, which the Navalny staff ascribed to the incompetence of the employed assailants.
However the provenance of the screenshots — equipped by a intermediary accused by Navalny’s staff of getting hyperlinks to Russia’s FSB safety service — have led others to query the proof and see in it a Kremlin ruse.
Nevzlin has strongly denied the claims. “I’ve nothing to do with any assaults on individuals, in any type in any way,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. He described the investigation into the assault — and different assaults in opposition to Navalny allies and staff members that the group additionally claims he was concerned in — as a “leak concocted in Moscow” to discredit him and divide the opposition.
Nevzlin informed Sota, a media outlet he funds, that he filed a report back to the Lithuanian police on August 5, when he first heard that this alleged information leak and the accusations in opposition to him had been being shared on-line, the outlet reported. Within the assertion, as shared by Sota, Nevzlin claims his interlocutor, the fixer, was sending provocative textual content messages looking for to implicate Nevzlin in ordering the assault on Volkov.
“Let’s have an unbiased investigation into these so-called ‘supplies’,” Nevzlin mentioned, “and, if the investigation deems it mandatory, a court docket in a democratic nation can assess them too. I’m satisfied that justice will verify the absurdity and full untenability of the accusations in opposition to me.”
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda mentioned this week that the nation “will all the time help the opposition that fights the Putin regime, and we are going to responsibly weigh all statements about who organised what”.
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Basis additionally claimed Nevzlin was behind an assault on the spouse of well-known economist Maxim Mironov, who lives in Argentina and has beforehand criticised Nevzlin on social media.
The Navalny staff didn’t clarify in depth what it believes to be the motives behind the steps they allege Nevzlin took in opposition to its members.
Nevzlin denies having ordered any assaults.
Concluding the video, Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations within the Navalny staff, steered the assault was perpetrated “by a gaggle of deranged oligarchs, posing as opposition figures, offended as a result of somebody refused to bow and pledge allegiance to them”. She claimed Nevzlin was utilizing ways he had picked up throughout the wild west years of doing enterprise in Russia within the Nineties.
Nevzlin gave up his Russian citizenship after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now based mostly predominantly in Israel. He describes himself as “an investor and philanthropist” who “helps the Russian opposition motion and persecuted human rights defenders”.
He has been identified to take up extra excessive political positions than different opposition figures, by calling not only for Russia’s defeat within the battle however for its break-up into separate states.
Nevzlin constructed his profession within the Menatep Group and Yukos oil firm within the Nineties together with his longtime enterprise accomplice Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Navalny’s staff additionally accused Khodorkovsky, by affiliation, of Nevzlin’s alleged crimes. As soon as Russia’s richest man, Khodorkovsky was jailed by Putin in 2003. After his launch, Khodorkovsky grew to become a distinguished dissident based mostly overseas, in addition to a founder and sponsor of a number of Russian unbiased media shops.
Khodorkovsky has denied having something to do with the assaults, which he described as “revolting crimes”, and mentioned the Navalny staff was “waging a marketing campaign to purposefully discredit” him. He mentioned Nevzlin was certainly his longtime colleague, however that politically the 2 had been pursuing very separate paths.
As for the accusations in opposition to Nevzlin, he mentioned “both they’re true, and Leonid Nevzlin has misplaced his thoughts. Or they’re an FSB provocation and a faux,” he mentioned in an announcement. “For apparent causes, I lean in direction of the second rationalization.”
The scandal has resulted within the greatest rift within the Russian opposition motion because the begin of the invasion of Ukraine two and a half years in the past.
Some distinguished figures have turned their wrath on Nevzlin, whereas others have questioned the supposed proof offered to the staff by a extremely questionable supply and accused the Navalny staff of falling right into a lure set for it by the FSB, a ruse meant to push the opposition into preventing one another slightly than the authorities in Moscow.
“It’s a horrifying state of affairs. Horrifying, and so politically damaging that we even puzzled for a second whether or not we should always keep silent about it,” Pevchikh mentioned within the video. “In any case, it performs proper into Putin’s fingers.”
However, she mentioned, the staff felt it needed to share the story. Navalny’s mom, Ludmila, mentioned she was “proud” of his allies for publishing the video, and Yulia, his widow, described the investigation’s obvious revelations as “horrifying”. His longtime buddy, the journalist Yevgenia Albats, nonetheless, described it as “squandering his legacy in squabbles, flushing it down the bathroom”.
Russian state media propagandists have adopted the scandal with glee. “It’s very humorous. They’re hating on one another and on the identical time saying: ‘what are you doing? That is fodder for Kremlin propaganda’,” pro-Kremlin TV anchor Vladimir Soloviev mentioned on air. “Nicely, the Kremlin propaganda has simply purchased itself some popcorn.”
