It was a crude and violent assault, but as a bloody message, it was chillingly effective. An attacker ambushed Leonid Volkov, a close adviser to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Nalvany, outside his home on the outskirts of Vilnius, Lithuania.
The assailant smashed open the car window and blasted Volkov with teargas, then repeatedly struck him with a hammer, breaking his left arm before fleeing the scene. It was, Volkov said in the aftermath, “an obvious, characteristic, typical, gangster-style greeting from Putin” and the assault reflected an emerging truth: Russian intelligence operations in Europe are back.
Lithuanian intelligence said the plot “seems to be the work of the Russian special services”, though Darius Jauniskis, the director of state security, said Moscow had apparently using a hired hand to carry…