“It’s Either Navalny or Putin”

Alexei Navalny’s Orthodox Jewish chief of staff on the scenarios for Putin’s end

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s return to Moscow last year after narrowly surviving a regime-backed poisoning attempt could only have one ending.

The founder of the “Russia of the Future” party, an anti-corruption campaigner who is Vladimir Putin’s highest-profile adversary, was arrested and swiftly sentenced to a long spell in a maximum-security jail on bogus tax evasion charges.

Not many know that Navalny’s chief of staff and number two, Leonid Volkov — a successful high-tech entrepreneur — is an Orthodox Jew who now lives with his young family in Vilnius, Lithuania.

When Navalny flew back into the lion’s den, it was after saying goodbye to Volkov in Germany.