Leonid Volkov is exactly the type of Russian dissident Europe has pledged to protect.
He oversaw some of the biggest organized resistance to President Vladimir V. Putin. He was chief of staff to the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who was jailed and then died under mysterious circumstances. He was convicted by a Russian court in absentia on trumped-up charges and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
But a backlash over a private rant in which he criticized Ukrainian officials has raised questions about Eastern Europe’s welcome of Russian dissidents and the limits of free speech on the continent.
After the comments were leaked, officials in Lithuania, where Mr. Volkov has lived for years, called for his expulsion from the country, saying he had crossed a line by criticizing a nation defending itself from an invasion.
It mattered little that Mr. Volkov has supported Ukraine in what he calls Russia’s immoral war. Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, fearful that they could be Russia’s next targets, have aligned themselves so strongly with Kyiv that the space for criticizing Ukraine’s conduct of the war has shrunk.
Russian exiles say the case has had a chilling effect and has led some to wonder where they might go next if they need to move again. Vytis Jurkonis, a Lithuanian human rights activist, said that the Lithuanian government’s threshold for tolerating “any ambiguity on Ukraine-related issues” had grown very low.
The trouble for Mr. Volkov, 45, began last week when an aggrieved former employee of Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation published screenshots of Mr. Volkov’s private message to her.
In the message, whose authenticity Mr. Volkov has acknowledged, he had harsh words for top Ukrainian officials, including Kyrylo Budanov. Mr. Budanov is a former leader of the country’s defense intelligence agency who was recently appointed chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Mr. Volkov referred to Mr. Budanov as a “village spin doctor,” a comment that touched a nerve in Ukraine, where people have long been sensitive to being portrayed as “peasants” by Russians.
Mr. Volkov also appeared to celebrate the death of the commander of a military unit made up of Russians who oppose Mr. Putin and fight on Ukraine’s side, writing that “finally, this Nazi has died.”
That commander, Denis Kapustin, openly espoused far-right views that led him to be barred from the European Union, and German officials identified him as a neo-Nazi, a charge he denied. Mr. Volkov wrote to the former colleague, who now works for Mr. Kapustin’s unit, that Mr. Kapustin’s “very existence was a godsend for the Kremlin.” He was apparently referring to the Kremlin propaganda line that Moscow is fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
(In a complicated twist, the Ukrainian government said last month that Mr. Kapustin was in fact not dead — that its intelligence services had faked his death in a scheme to collect reward money from Russia. That assertion could not be verified.)
The reaction among Lithuanian leaders to Mr. Volkov’s remarks was swift.
Migration officials asked the country’s security agency for a review of his immigration status, deeming him a potential threat to national security.
“Such a person should not remain in Lithuania,” Prime Minister Inga Ruginiene said last week, after saying that decisions about Mr. Volkov’s residency permit should wait for the security review.
In a separate comment to The New York Times, Ms. Ruginiene’s office said that Mr. Volkov’s remarks “go well beyond acceptable boundaries.”
President Gitanas Nauseda, in an interview with the Baltic News Service, accused Mr. Volkov of using “language that resembles Vladimir Putin’s own jargon.” Laurynas Kasciunas, deputy head of the defense committee in the Lithuanian Parliament, made a similar comment to The Times, accusing Mr. Volkov of “mirroring the Kremlin’s narrative.”
“It was shocking to read that he demeaned Ukrainian officers defending their country against Russia,” Mr. Kasciunas said.
The Ukrainian government, too, has reacted strongly to Mr. Volkov’s comments, saying this week that it had opened a criminal proceeding to investigate the remarks.
Mr. Volkov declined to comment when reached by The Times. In a social media post, Mr. Volkov, a Russian who is Jewish, reiterated his opposition to “neo-Nazis” but conceded that he “should not have written that message and, definitely, should have controlled my emotions better.”
In a private message that also became public, Maria Pevchikh, one of Mr. Volkov’s colleagues, called his earlier message “appalling, rude, unethical and inappropriate” and said it did not represent their organization’s position. Ms. Pevchikh’s message had been written to the same disgruntled former employee who leaked Mr. Volkov’s message.
The case has demonstrated the complicated relationship between Russian exiles and the Eastern European countries that have harbored them, especially the Baltic states.
These countries have been generous in offering asylum to a range of dissident Russians, from Navalny allies to antiwar buskers, since before the invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Jurkonis, the human rights activist, said he believed that Lithuania was still committed to hosting dissidents at risk in their home countries, including those from Russia and Belarus.
Politicians in the Baltics, however, have at times viewed Russian opposition figures with suspicion. These officials have suggested that not just the Kremlin but also ordinary Russians, including Putin opponents, hold imperial views about Russia’s former subjects. Complaints by some of the Russians about democratic failings in European countries have compounded the sensitivities.
These dynamics have made any commentary by exiled Russians on the war in Ukraine particularly fraught. Many people in the Baltics link their own traumatic past of Soviet occupation to Ukraine’s current ordeal and view their security through the prism of Ukraine’s, said Aine Ramonaite, a professor of political sociology at Vilnius University in Lithuania.
“If Ukraine falls, the Baltic states could face a direct threat,” she said. “Everything boils down to this issue, and details no longer matter.”
That became apparent in 2022, the first year of full-scale war in Ukraine. The authorities in Latvia stripped TV Rain, an independent Russian news channel, of its broadcasting license. After offering its team asylum, Latvia took action against the channel when it aired an unscripted comment about aid to Russian soldiers. The comment set off a flood of accusations of pro-Kremlin sympathies.
About two years after the channel’s license was revoked, a Latvian court overturned that decision. By then, TV Rain had relocated to the Netherlands. The Latvian government targeted the media again late last year, pulling public funding from Russian-language news broadcasting on security grounds. That forced a public radio station to shut down.
When Mr. Volkov fled Russia for Lithuania, he was about a year removed from running Mr. Navalny’s 2018 presidential bid. Known as the brains behind Mr. Navalny’s political operations, Mr. Volkov was also viewed as quick-tempered, unwilling to compromise and at times prone to controversial statements.
In 2023, he quit his post as the chairman of Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation after he wrote a letter to Josep Borrell, then the E.U. foreign policy chief, asking for sanctions relief for several Russian oligarchs. Mr. Volkov later called that a “big political mistake.”
He remained a key figure in the foundation and was often seen leading meetings with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Mr. Navalny, who has carried on her husband’s work.
Lithuanian officials had thrown their weight behind Mr. Volkov as recently as 2024, when he was attacked outside his home in Vilnius, the capital. An investigation described his attackers as hired Polish football hooligans without specifying who was behind them.
Ms. Navalnaya and other prominent figures in her organization have not spoken publicly about Mr. Volkov’s current controversy. But it has spooked other Russian exiles.
One Russian journalist at an exiled publication in Vilnius said his newsroom was trying to come up with plans in case Lithuania reversed its support. The journalist asked not to be identified, citing fears of repercussions from the Lithuanian government.
Others said dissidents were now watching what they said. “People are keeping quiet because they don’t want to get canceled like Volkov,” said Vsevolod Chernozub, a figure in opposition protests in Russia in 2011 who was offered political asylum in Lithuania in 2014.
While he feels safe in Lithuania, he said, Russian exiles are increasingly talking among themselves about where they can go next.
“The environment is getting emotionally fraught,” Mr. Chernozub said, adding that people were worried about having their opinions misconstrued.
Tomas Dapkus and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
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