The two men detained in Poland in early April on suspicion of assaulting Russian opposition leader Leonid Volkov in Vilnius are expected to be brought to Lithuania by mid-May, the prosecution service said.
Gintarė Vitkauskaitė-Satkauskienė, spokeswoman for Lithuania’s prosecution service, has told BNS that the Lithuanian Criminal Police Bureau is arranging the transfer.
“This process is not of a public nature,” she said.
The prosecutor’s office refrained from disclosing whether Lithuania is also seeking the extradition of the detained Belarusian citizen who, according to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, is suspected of ordering the attack on Volkov.
The two Polish citizens were arrested in Warsaw on April 3, and the city’s regional court later decided to extradite them to Lithuania.
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Joanna Adamowicz, spokeswoman for the court, told the AP news agency earlier that the men would stay in custody until May 13.
The regional court in Warsaw also agreed to hand the suspects over to Lithuania on the condition that, if sentenced to prison, they will serve their time in Poland.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda was the first on April 19 to break the news of the arrest of the two men who are suspected of attacking Volkov. On the same day, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on X that one more person had been detained, a Belarusian citizen, who was the alleged mastermind.
Volkov, a close ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison, was attacked in his car outside his home in the Lithuanian capital late on March 12. The attacker broke the car’s window, sprayed tear gas and started hitting Volkov with a meat mallet, causing a broken arm and leg injuries.
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