Navalny’s team accuses ex‑Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin of orchestrating brutal attacks in new investigation. We detail the findings

On July 5, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF, or ФБК in Russian) received an intriguing email via the contact address listed on their website: “Hello! Are you aware of who financed and orchestrated the assault on [Leonid] Volkov? Did you know there was a plan to abduct him and smuggle him into Russia? And what about the person who arranged and funded the provocations involving the mock punishment cell? I have this information and can substantiate it with chat logs and, crucially, audio recordings of the person who commissioned the attack. You’re acquainted with him, and you’re even friends.”

The sender provided their phone number and insisted on speaking exclusively with Leonid Volkov and Maria Pevchikh, two of Alexei Navalny’s closest aides who now lead ACF.

On July 8 or 9, Volkov personally called the author of the message. The man claimed that the beating, as well as the subsequent plan to kidnap and transport him to Russia, were being coordinated with the St. Petersburg branch of the FSB, Russian Federal Security Service. He identified Leonid Nevzlin as the one who ordered the attack.

Nevzlin has been Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s closest associate since the days of Yukos, a former Russian oil and gas giant. When Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003, Nevzlin managed to flee to Israel. Five years later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of ordering contract killings.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Nevzlin’s public speeches and social media posts have made no distinction between Putin’s regime and the citizens of Russia. In an interview with popular Russian YouTuber Yury Dud, Khodorkovsky described his former business partner as “more than a relative.”

The source informed Volkov that during the assassination attempt, the attackers were instructed to “beat him more severely with hammers, to the point of putting him in a wheelchair,” and that this was supposed to have happened earlier—but the perpetrators kept “stalling.”

Volkov and Pevchikh had been under extensive surveillance, the source claimed, with photo reports being sent to Nevzlin. This included photographs taken inside Pevchikh’s house: allegedly, the person who commissioned the attack had an “obsessive idea” to capture his targets while they were “sleeping.”

To substantiate these claims, the caller began sending videos to Volkov. The first was filmed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2023, capturing the attack on Ivan Zhdanov during the opening of the SHIZO, or isolation cell, installation—a mock-up of the cell where Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, was held before his death.

The second video, recorded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, shows the cameraman following a woman pushing a stroller down the street. He then shouts in English, “Stay away from Russia!” and attempts to hit her. The victim screams loudly. The woman in the video is Alexandra Petrachkova, the wife of economist Maxim Mironov, who is closely associated with Navalny’s team. Later, the investigative outlet The Insider discovered that the Polish citizen who attacked her had connections to the organisers of the assault on Volkov in Vilnius, Lithuania. The investigation mentioned that the attacker was holding a phone, which can be seen in the footage from security cameras.

Along with these videos, the source sent Volkov screenshots of correspondence with an account named Leonid Nevzlin—the quality of the screenshots was poor, with one phone’s camera capturing the screen of another. In one of the messages, the author claims to have successfully obtained the address of ACF’s headquarters. In response, Leonid Nevzlin provides talking points for discrediting Alexei Navalny—accusing him of promising to fight the regime while remaining idle and effectively working for the Kremlin. The messages were dated October 2023, four months before Navalny’s murder in the penal colony.

The sender then sent Leonid Nevzlin several photos of weapons, adding that “Volkov was not at the rally in Vilnius.” In subsequent exchanges, the interlocutors refer to Volkov as a “package,” and the would-be kidnappers as “postmen.” One message reads: “There is a corridor for the package, but it needs to be confirmed within a day or two, as the package is not returning to the sender entirely voluntarily.” Later in the ACF film, correspondence is shown indicating that the plan was to transport the “package” to Russia via Riga, Latvia, and then by sea on a chartered vessel.

The correspondence also reveals that one of the perpetrators of the attack on Mironov’s wife in Argentina soon flew to New York to meet with Volkov, but Leonid Nevzlin appears skeptical: “It’s a shame the original plan for sending didn’t work out.” Additionally, Leonid Nevzlin expresses concern that a “chair” (likely referring to a wheelchair) could interfere with the “sending.”

To verify the authenticity of the correspondence, ACF decided to scrutinise the details. For instance, one message mentions a meeting between Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a Spanish lawyer; open-source information confirms that the businessman was indeed in Madrid on that day. Moreover, among the collection of messages was a photo of Nevzlin’s Belgian residence permit. ACF found an organisation registered under Nevzlin’s name in the same municipality that, judging by the photo, issued the residence permit.

ACF cites the writing style of the messages as further circumstantial evidence that the provided materials were genuine—Maria Pevchikh, who had corresponded with Nevzlin, confirms that the punctuation quirks in the messages received from the source are characteristic of his writing.

On July 10, Pevchikh called the source. 45 minutes into the conversation, he revealed his name—Andrey Matus. Russian media outlets have mentioned a man by this name on multiple occasions. For example, VChK-OGPU, a Telegram channel previously suspected of links to Russian law enforcement but now also declared a “foreign agent,” wrote about him in connection with the case of notorious crime boss Young Shakro. In these publications, Matus was referred to as reshalschik, or a “fixer.”

Matus told Pevchikh that he had worked for Nevzlin and Khodorkovsky for three years, from 2019, carrying out various informal tasks—such as supplying materials to The Dossier Center, an investigative project. Later, the assignments became riskier. For instance, when there was a “leak” after the attack on Volkov, Nevzlin instructed Matus to collect the phones from the perpetrators, which he did. As a result, according to the film, the dissatisfied paymasters ordered a hit on Matus himself, prompting him to turn to ACF in hope of a reward for the information and assistance in leaving Russia.

After the initial conversation with Matus, ACF concluded that he was indeed well-informed about the inner workings of Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin’s organisations—for example, he mentioned the “security officers” Kristijonas Kučinskas and Roman Zhelyazko. Information about these individuals was corroborated by open-source data. ACF asked two independent investigators—Christo Grozev and Mikhail Maglov—to review their findings.

Matus also claimed that Nevzlin was in “close contact” with Roman Vidyukov, the chief investigator in many cases against Alexei Navalny, who was promoted to deputy head of the investigative department after the politician’s murder. According to Matus, Nevzlin was particularly interested in where the convicted politician would be transferred.

“He knew everything that was happening, literally, a few days before anyone else in this country or abroad found out about it,” Matus asserted in his conversation with Pevchikh. When directly asked how much access to such information might cost, Matus replied: $500,000.

On several occasions, Matus mentioned audio recordings of his conversations with Nevzlin but refused to send them, promising instead to let them be heard in person.

Despite the obvious risk, Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov met with Matus in Montenegro on July 12. ACF employees recorded the conversation using a hidden mic, with the meeting taking place in a restaurant.

This time, Matus named the organiser whom Nevzlin had tasked with attacking Volkov—Anatoly Blinov, a resident of Riga. He also mentioned a fabricated criminal case against Vladimir Ashurkov, Navalny’s associate, allegedly initiated by the Latvian prosecutor’s office. As stated in the film, Ashurkov was indeed interrogated in London in the presence of Latvian security forces.

According to Matus, Nevzlin was dissatisfied with the outcome of the assassination attempt on Volkov and withheld the promised $250,000 payment to the perpetrators. The parties began to blackmail each other, prompting Nevzlin to order Matus to seize the phones from Blinov and the Polish perpetrators.

“I can beat him up myself,” Matus recounted Nevzlin’s words. “I needed him to be twiddling his thumbs to the sparrows there. You put a couple of bruises on him there? On this topic, the scythe finds the stone, and they slink away from it. And he was supposed to pour out the dough to them, 250 thousand. 150 was supposed to be taken by these perpetrators, well, roughly speaking, disappear,” can be heard on the recording made by Volkov and Zhdanov.

At one point, Matus suggested they move to the second floor of the restaurant, where, as claimed in the film, he played a recording of a phone conversation. The speakers discuss the attack on Mironov’s wife in Argentina, and a person with a voice strikingly similar to Nevzlin’s expresses disappointment that the woman didn’t suffer more serious injuries. “It was all done so lame,” he says. The recording features filler phrases like “like” and “so to speak” repeated in various ways—both turns of phrase characteristic of Leonid Nevzlin’s speech patterns, as noted by ACF.

The owner of the voice resembling Nevzlin’s insists that the perpetrators themselves should face prosecution, for example, under the article on treason. In the recording, Matus proposes a more lenient alternative—simply planting drugs on them, but the client is adamant.

ACF was unable to obtain the original recordings. Beyond financial compensation, Matus was interested in assistance with obtaining a visa. Maria Pevchikh says she suggested the informant testify to Polish investigators and become a witness in the case of the beating of Volkov to improve his chances of entering a witness protection program. Matus pledged to deliver the perpetrators’ phones and send the recordings but then vanished, ceasing to respond to messages. Eventually, a portion of the correspondence was published by the Russian state media outlet RT.

After meeting with Matus, while examining the correspondence he provided, ACF noticed that the person who commissioned the attack sometimes wrote from another account—Arye Bar Am, which in Hebrew means “Lion, son of the people.” The account’s avatar features a bag with a dollar sign. Using a service that allows users to check how a particular number is saved in other people’s contacts, they discovered that Leonid Nevzlin’s actual contact had been saved at least once as Arye Bar Am. An old Twitter account with the same handle was found, with its owner congratulating Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s daughter on her birthday and threatening opposition figure Fyodor Krasheninnikov, who had spoken critically about the oligarch.

Reflecting on Nevzlin’s potential motives, Pevchikh stated that neither ACF nor she personally had ever had any conflicts with him. Pevchikh first met Nevzlin in May 2022 when he was in Vilnius and asked her to give Volkov a book with an inscription, briefly mentioning that they did not see eye to eye.

Leonid Volkov said that he had encountered Nevzlin only twice in his life. In 2019, they met at Nevzlin’s apartment in Jerusalem. A few weeks later, ACF was launching the “Smart Voting” project, which faced fierce criticism from Khodorkovsky and the media outlets associated with him. Navalny publicly responded to the oligarch, after which Nevzlin began bombarding Volkov with messages: “What are you doing, how dare you, I will rip you apart for Misha, Misha is my best friend, why is your Lesha putting his shoulder to the wheel against Misha, how dare he, what’s going on? In a style, as if we were best friends and I betrayed him. That is, there was an insane stream of threats, profanity and insults, because he dared to offend Misha,” Volkov recalls. At the time, Navalny advised his associate not to respond.

In May 2023, Nevzlin resumed writing to Pevchikh, urging her to “talk sense into Volkov” and “not go public,” and then proposed meeting again in Vilnius. Pevchikh ignored these messages as well, but Nevzlin persisted, criticising the installation featuring Navalny’s cell in Prague and forwarding tweets by Maxim Mironov that had irritated him.

Pevchikh encountered Nevzlin in person for the second time at a conference in Vilnius in May 2023. Following her speech, he seized the microphone and lashed out at ACF: “It looked like some kind of fit, to be honest, about Volkov, that he should be fired, that I should be fired, that we are all traitors and crooks, that Volkov is threatening him. Volkov was in the audience and asked—how can he threaten if they only communicated in 2019? Nevzlin did not relinquish the microphone and continued to assert that he knew ACF was preparing an investigation against him,” Pevchikh recounted. The moderator of the meeting, journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, intervened to halt this altercation, and ACF did not perceive this outburst as a genuine threat at the time.

“Leonid Nevzlin poses a danger to those around him; he is a mentally disturbed individual who believes in his own exceptionality and his right to decide others’ fates,” Pevchikh concludes.

Prior to publishing the investigation, Pevchikh called Nevzlin. He denied any involvement in the attacks on Volkov and Mironov, stating, “I did not order Volkov, I did not order Mironov, I did not order any corridors.”

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev