Vladimir Putin is a ‘monkey with a grenade’: Navalny aide says it is time to get tough with Russian leader

Just like his boss, Leonid Volkov knew what he was getting into. Alexei Navalny’s return to Russia meant his arrest, court, prison, and the start of a protracted struggle. For his right-hand man, it meant a period of voluntary exile in Europe to be out of the reach of the Kremlin’s long arms.

With the Kremlin critic jailed, this week it fell to Mr Volkov to unveil Team Navalny’s updated game plan from his new home in Lithuania. The group was calling a pause to rallies until the spring, he announced. The battle to release Russia's prisoner No 1 would now switch to “foreign policy tools".

Speaking with The Independent, the Navalny aide said the surprise change in strategy was the inevitable result of a “demonstratively cruel crackdown” from the Kremlin. But he insists it was neither a “capitulation” or “wholly unplanned”. Mr Navalny’s team was still operating according to a “manual” agreed with him before he left for Moscow — and they had already scored “many moral victories”.

Mr Navalny’s team refused to be pulled into a “Belarusian style” confrontation, Mr Volkov said. “Vladimir Putin is behaving like a monkey with a grenade. We don’t want to risk a cycle of crackdown, and increasing pain and disappointment.”

The aide said he believed the international community was finally shedding “illusions” about Russia’s 21-year leader. It had seen that President Putin had “clearly authorised” a chemical weapons programme, and then “lied” about it. It was worse than Iran or North Korea. “People are watching a street hooligan in action, and they are just flabbergasted,” he said.

Mr Volkov is the most senior figure of a core team scattered around Russia and Europe. An energetic IT specialist originally from Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, the 40-year-old began working with Mr Navalny in 2012. But it was 2013, when he powered a slick Moscow mayoral campaign for the opposition politician, that Mr Volkov showed his talents. Mr Navalny saw his share of the vote increase from 3 per cent to an official result of 27 per cent; he has not been allowed near a ballot box since.

Now, the aide is coordinating lobbying of western governments with an aim to impose new “Navalny” sanctions on a number of wealthy individuals in Mr Putin’s inner circle.

A list of targets was agreed with Mr Navalny before he returned to Russia, and was published by another wingman, the London-based Vladimir Ashurkov, on the politician's jailing last week. Targeting and freezing their accounts will have an oversized impact on Mr Putin’s confidence, he said.

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“You need to work out what is important to Putin. What our palace investigation showed above all else is that he is simply obsessed with cash.”

That viral investigation, which has already been viewed over 110 million times on YouTube, has fuelled the most serious challenge to Vladimir Putin’s rule in a decade. Its details of grotesque luxury, with toilet brushes costing the near equivalent of a year’s pension in some Russian regions, have tapped into a fertile market for social justice.

Pro-Navalny protests that followed were attended by hundreds of thousands across Russia, and brought people out in towns and cities previously considered loyal.

The combination of recent events and crackdown has also seen Mr Putin’s popularity seriously dented, especially in the youngest age group. In a new survey published on Thursday by the independent pollsters Levada Centre, the president’s approval ratings among 18- to 24-year-olds were shown to have collapsed from 80 per cent to 51 in three years to January 2021.  

Mr Volkov said those fundamental shifts represent the opposition’s main hope as they prepare for a David and Goliath style confrontation in the lead up to elections to the State Duma this Autumn.

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“Our support base has grown exponentially on the back of Alexei’s poisoning and his heroic return to Russia,” he said. “But moral superiority is also worth a lot, and people see there is a clear choice between the forces of good and evil.”

For some, Team Navalny has another asset up its sleeve: the politician's wife. Yulia Navalnaya's obvious composure throughout her family’s very dramatic ordeal have fuelled suggestion she could be put forward as a candidate.

But Mr Volkov rubbishes the idea of such a prospect.

“It’s a Kremlin trick to get people used to the idea of her husband being locked up,” he said.  “We have a leader, and his name is Alexei Navalny.”