Infighting rocks Russia's exiled opposition as Navalny allies accuse colleagues of foul play
World
Infighting rocks Russia's exiled opposition as Navalny allies accuse colleagues of foul play
LONDON (Reuters) - Splits in Russia's opposition in exile have widened sharply, shifting their focus from political activism to infighting after allies of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny accused another opposition figure of ordering attacks on their activists.
The scandal undermines already troubled efforts to forge a united front against the Kremlin, risks damaging the opposition's credibility in the eyes of supporters and the West, and pits the two most high-profile opposition groupings against one another setting up a potentially protracted standoff.
The two opposition movements - one run by allies of the late Navalny and the other run by Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been involved in public disputes before, but their latest disagreement is the most potent yet, with the Navalny camp publicly accusing Leonid Nevzlin, an Israel-based tycoon and Khodorkovsky ally, of ordering assaults on senior Navalny aides Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov and on the wife of an Argentina-based activist.
In the most serious incident, Volkov was attacked outside his house in Vilnius, Lithuania in March this year, a month after Navalny died in an Arctic prison, by a hammer-wielding assailant who he said had left him with a broken arm and a badly damaged leg.
In a nearly one-hour long video investigation published on Navalny's YouTube channel on Thursday, his team alleged that the assault and two others had been ordered not by the Russian state, but by Nevzlin.
Both Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky, who himself spent a decade in Russian prisons on what the West said were politically-motivated charges, dismissed the claims as groundless.
