Navalny Ally Attacked With Hammer

A longtime ally of Alexei Navalny has been attacked outside his home in Lithuania. Leonid Volkov was in his yard Tuesday night when he was beaten with a hammer and sprayed with tear gas, the Guardian reports. His car window was also smashed. Volkov, who was Navalny's chief of staff until the opposition leader's death last month while serving a prison sentence in the Russian Arctic, himself faces politically motivated charges in Russia and has lived outside the country for years for his own protection, the BBC reports. A member of his team, who posted pictures of Volkov's injuries to social media, says that while the attacker did not say anything during the assault, "Of course this is a clear political attack, there is no doubt here."

"The man attacked me in the yard, hit me on the leg about 15 times. The leg somehow is OK. It hurts to walk," Volkov later said on Telegram. "However, I broke my arm. They literally wanted to make a schnitzel out of me." He blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin's henchmen for the attack, but said it would not dissuade him. "We will work and we will not give up," he wrote. His wife agreed, writing in her own post, "We will all work even more. And with even greater anger." (More Alexei Navalny stories.)