Prominent anti-Kremlin oligarch allegedly ordered attacks on Navalny’s confidants — Novaya Gazeta Europe

Associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have accused Russian billionaire Leonid Nevzlin of ordering a hammer attack on the former chairman of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Leonid Volkov, in Vilnius earlier this year.

Volkov was attacked near his home on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania, on the evening of March 12. He suffered a broken arm and leg injuries. Three men were arrested in Poland the following month on suspicion of carrying out the attack.

In a video investigation released on Thursday, Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), claimed that a “fixer” named Andrey Matus approached the FBK in July claiming he had evidence linking Leonid Nevzlin, a close ally of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to the attack on Volkov, as well as other, less serious attacks on Navalny's ally Ivan Zhdanov and Alexandra Petrachkova, the wife of Russian economist and activist Maxim Mironov.

Matus, who said he worked for Khodorkovsky for three years, sent the FBK previously unpublished videos from the perspective of the attackers during the attack on Petrachkova in Argentina and when Zhdanov was pelted with eggs at a public event in Geneva.

Matus also showed Signal messages between a man whose contact name appeared to be Leonid Nevzlin and a person who planned the attack on Volkov in Vilnius. The attacker allegedly planned to beat Volkov and then “transport” him to Russia, where he would face prosecution for his ties to Navalny, whose three organizations have been classified as “extremist” in Russia.

The message thread was independently analyzed by Christo Grozev, Bellingcat's former chief Russia researcher, and Mikhail Maglov, who works for the Russian investigative portal Proekt, Pevchikh said. Both concluded that it was probably not a fake.

Volkov and Zhdanov then arranged a meeting with Matus in Montenegro, where he played them an audio recording of a phone conversation he had with Nevzlin in which they discussed the attack on Volkov. According to Pevchikh, Nevzlin was unhappy with the outcome and refused to pay the organizers the agreed sum of $250,000.

While the phone conversation that Zhdanov and Volkov recorded without Matus' knowledge could not be fully verified, Pevchikh points out that the man in the phone conversation has the same manner of speaking and the same voice as Nevzlin.

Pevchikh added that the FBK had notified “the law enforcement authorities of the countries Leonid Nevzlin visited” and signaled its readiness to release all available evidence and testify in court.

“Leonid Nevzlin should be arrested and brought before an independent court for organizing the kidnapping and attempted murder of Leonid Volkov, as well as the attacks on Petrachkova and Zhdanov,” Pevchikh said.

Responding to the FBK's allegations, Nevzlin denied on Thursday that he had “anything to do with any attacks on people in any form,” adding that he saw “no point” in discussing the details of what he called a “so-called 'leak' organized by Moscow.”

Nevzlin called for an independent investigation into the allegations and, if necessary, “a court in a democratic country” to assess the authenticity of the materials viewed by the FBK. He wrote:

“I am convinced that the judiciary will confirm the absurdity and total untenability of the allegations made against me.”

Khodorkovsky also responded to the allegations on Thursday, saying: “Either it is true and Leonid Nevzlin has gone mad. Or it is a provocation by the FSB and a fake that someone spent a lot of money on. … For some reason, Maria Pevchich is convinced that the former is true.”

Khodorkovsky described Nevzlin as his “business partner, ally and long-time friend” but said the two had taken “separate political paths.” He stressed that he viewed the attacks as “heinous crimes” that must be “thoroughly investigated.” He noted, however, that if the FBK wanted to accuse him of something, “they could go to court” rather than “underhandedly ruining” his reputation.

Nevzlin, the former co-owner of Khodorkovsky's oil company Yukos, emigrated from Russia to Israel in 2003. That same year, Khodorkovsky was arrested for tax evasion. Nevzlin, a prominent Putin critic, renounced his Russian citizenship shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and is now an Israeli citizen.

On September 6, six days before Navalny's team published its investigation, Russian propaganda channel RT published an investigation into the same leaked message history, which they said had been provided by Anatoly Blinov, a man the FBK had named as one of the organizers of the attack on Volkov.