Last week he lived that nightmare. A phone call in the early morning told him that Navalny had collapsed while on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk and he was now in a coma. He says that expecting this moment has not made reality any easier to process.
“I was terrified. Of course, it was an emotionally very dramatic blow,” he says. “That it took me several hours to concentrate.”
But as Navalny’s chief of staff, he had a task to do: get him out of Russia and into trusted medical care.
Volkov, along with the German NGO, Cinema for Peace, organized an air ambulance that was made to wait at a nearby airport, while Russian doctors claimed that Navalny was too ill to be moved.
Navalny’s allies believe the delay was deliberate and intended not to detect the poison in his body.
He was eventually flown to Berlin where doctors at Charite Hospital determined he was probably poisoned by a substance from a group of chemicals known as cholinesterase inhibitors. The inability of the medical team so far to determine the specific poison has been seized by Russian Presidential spokesman Vladimir Putin as justification for Russian authorities not yet opening a criminal investigation.
Volkov says that answer is only one factor that points to the involvement of the Russian state in an attempt to assassinate Navalny.
“Based on the information I have at this point in time, I strongly believe it is the state as part of the state. So from now on we have no evidence that Putin ordered it. “but the level of organization. But the level of organization, the poisons they used. It’s not something you can buy in a pharmacy, in a drugstore around the corner,” says Volkov.
Russia denies any attempt to harm Navalny.
‘Protection only: publicity’
“That when we discussed it, our thought was the only possible protection … is maximum publicity. That the greater the number of our supporters, the greater his approval ratings, the greater the risks the Kremlin would take around him. to kill. “
So why now? Navalny has been openly fighting the Russian elite for 10 years. If people in the Russian state are trying to assassinate Navalny, why would they risk turning an admired activist into a political martyr?
Volkov says the timing points to two possible factors.
And in two weeks, Russia will hold its own municipal elections. The National Organization of Navalny has prepared for this event with a campaign that promotes tactical voices. It turned out to be effective in defeating pro-Putin candidates in last year’s elections in Moscow.
Finally, says Volkov, someone has made a calculation: The benefits of removing Navalny from Russian political life will outweigh all the problems of his angry supporters.
“It was an attempt to kill, not to scare him off,” Volkov says.
Navalny’s recovery is expected to be slow. It will be some time before we know if and when he will resume his role as the Kremlin’s strongest and most effective critic.
What does Russia look like without Navalny? “We are not considering that,” Volkov says.
CNN’s Sebastian Shukla and John Torigoe contributed to this report.
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