Poland will deport two men who were arrested in Poland in early April on suspicion of assaulting Russian opposition figure Leonid Volkov in Vilnius, the spokesperson for Lithuania’s prosecution service, Gintarė Vitkauskaite-Satkauskiene announced on Thursday.

On 12 March, Volkov was assaulted with a hammer and spray gas outside his home in Vilnius. His car was also damaged. On 19 April, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda first informed about the suspected Polish citizens who had been detained on 3 April.

“A month ago, Navalny aide Leonid Volkov was brutally attacked in Vilnius. Today, I am glad to announce that suspects have been detained in Poland,” Nausėda wrote on X in April, thanking his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, Polish and Lithuanian law enforcement and warning the organisers of the crime “not to try to repeat it.”

The court agreed to remand the suspects in custody and extradite them to Lithuania on the condition that, if convicted, they would serve their sentences in Poland.

The Lithuanian Criminal Investigation Bureau, which is responsible for coordinating the transfer of the suspects to Lithuania, did not confirm that it would also seek the extradition of the detained Belarusian citizen suspected of ordering the attack, as Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk had previously said.

Volkov is the former chief of staff of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), who died in February this year in the IK-3 “special regime” colony, known as “Polar Wolf,” in Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

According to earlier reports from Lithuanian authorities, the attack on Volkov was likely organised by the Kremlin’s special services through a recruited person.

“It is of enormous importance to investigate and to expose all the chain-of-command from Putin to the guy with the hammer,” Volkov wrote on X after the suspected men were detained.

(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | Euractiv.pl)

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