Leonid Volkov (politician)

Leonid Volkov was born on 10 November 1980 in Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg) in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Soviet Union. His father is Mikhail Vladimirovich Volkov, professor, Chief Researcher of the Laboratory of Combinatorial Algebra, Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Ural Federal University. His mother is Susanna Borisovna Volkova (Kupchik), Senior Lecturer of the Department of New Information Technologies in Education, Ural State Pedagogical University. Volkov is Jewish; on official documents, however, his ethnicity is shown as Russian. On March 1, 2009, he was elected as a deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma in the electoral district No. 10 of the Kirovsky district (self-nomination). He became a member of the permanent parliamentary commission on urban economy, urban planning and land use and of the permanent deputy commission on local government, cultural and information policy. In 2013, he moved with his family from Yekaterinburg to Luxembourg. He returned to Russia at the end of 2014. Since 2020, Volkov has been living and working in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. On 4 October 2022, his book Putinland was published. == Political activities ==

Since 2009, he has been a member of the Solidarnost movement. On April 10, 2010, he organized a rally against the construction of a temple on in Yekaterinburg — the event gathered more than 3,500 participants and became the largest protest action in the city since perestroika. On October 24, 2010, he was one of the organizers of the rally in support of . He is a member of the central election committee of the Russian Opposition Coordination Council and was one of the leaders of Navalny's 2013 mayoral campaign for Moscow. He was formerly a member of the political council of the People's Freedom Party. From December 2016, Volkov was chief of staff to Alexei Navalny's 2018 presidential campaign. In December 2015 Volkov founded the Internet Protection Society (IPS), a NGO that published monthly an Internet Freedom Index, which monitored over-regulation and limitation on human rights by the Russian state and the extent to which international companies such as Google and Facebook comply with state regulatory demands. On 9 March 2023, Volkov stepped down as the chairman of the board of the Anti-Corruption Foundation after he had admitted to signing a letter on behalf of the Anti-Corruption Foundation in October which asked the European Union for sanctions on Mikhail Fridman to be dropped without consulting his associates. He was replaced with Maria Pevchikh. In a private message in late December 2025, Volkov expressed his satisfaction with the news of the apparent death of Denis Kapustin, the commander of the Russian Volunteer Corps, a right-wing militia made up of ethnic Russians fighting on Ukraine's side. Lithuania's Migration Department reached out to the State Security Department on January 6, 2026, to request further consultations regarding a potential threat to state security. The department was requested to evaluate Volkov's public statements and review his residency status. ==Attack==

On 12 March 2024, Meduza reported that Volkov was attacked by a person with a hammer outside his house in Vilnius, Lithuania. According to Navalny press secretary Kira Yarmysh, tear gas was sprayed in Volkov's eyes and he was beaten repeatedly with a hammer. The politician and lawyer Ivan Zhdanov told the media that Volkov survived the attack, which is being investigated as political terror. In his first interview following the attack, Volkov stated that he would "never give up" his struggle against Putin. Lithuanian authorities said they suspected Russian special services of responsibility. In September 2024, associates of Navalny said they had obtained evidence that Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian-Israeli billionaire and former co-owner of Yukos, had ordered the attack and failed to pay $250,000 to those he hired to carry it out. Nevzlin denied the accusations, suggesting that it was "concocted in Moscow". That same month, a Russian lawyer and former Gazprom-Media director accused of helping organise the attack was arrested in Poland. ==References==