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Four suspects have been arrested in Poland following a vicious attack on the former top aide of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as part of what Polish prosecutors called “a multi-threaded investigation” into assaults against Russian dissidents across Europe and the Americas.
The national prosecutor’s office said it had identified eight suspects in connection with the attack on Leonid Volkov in Vilnius, Lithuania, earlier this year and was holding four in pretrial detention.
One of those detained was named as Anatoly B, a Russian national and critic of the Kremlin, who was arrested last Friday and is understood to have been a former lawyer of the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who sought political asylum in London after falling out with President Vladimir Putin.
The Polish arrests come after Navalny’s team recently accused another Kremlin critic, businessman Leonid Nevzlin, of hiring two Polish men to attack Volkov with hammers outside his home in Vilnius in March.
The Russian community of dissidents living abroad has long been prone to infighting, but the accusations against Nevzlin have provoked the biggest rift in the opposition movement since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
It is also the first time Navalny’s influential Anti-Corruption Foundation has accused a supposed ally of ordering a violent attack — which it had initially attributed to Kremlin thugs — on one of their number.
Nevzlin has denied any involvement in attacks on Volkov and other Kremlin opponents.
The Polish prosecutor’s office said two Poles had already been detained in Warsaw in April and charged with assaulting Volkov “because of his nationality and political activities”.
Besides Anatoly B and the two Poles, four of the other suspects are Polish and one is from Belarus.
The Polish investigation is examining events “that took place both in Europe (including Vilnius) and in South and North America,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Navalny’s team based their accusations against Nevzlin in part on what they said were screenshots of private conversations on the Signal messaging app between the businessman and a fixer, allegedly Anatoly B. He has been charged by Polish prosecutors with directing the assault on Volkov and placed in detention for an initial period of three months.
Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in Russia in February, prompting widespread condemnation from western leaders who blamed Putin for his death.
In the 1990s, Nevzlin worked for the Yukos oil company led by his longtime business partner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Navalny’s team also accused Khodorkovsky, by association, of Nevzlin’s alleged crimes. Once Russia’s richest man, Khodorkovsky was jailed by Putin in 2003. After his release, he joined the overseas opposition to the Kremlin while providing funding to several Russian independent media outlets.
Khodorkovsky has denied any involvement in the Vilnius attack and instead accused the Navalny team of “waging a campaign to purposefully discredit” him.
Berezovsky became one of Russia’s most influential businessmen by benefiting from the privatisation of state assets that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he escaped to London in 2000 after falling out with Putin. He was found dead in his luxury home in 2013, a decade after being granted political asylum, in what British police concluded was a suicide.