Interview 10:24 , May 15, 2017 Away

Leonid Volkov, head of headquarters of Alexei Navalny

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L. Volkov - We landed in Vladivostok about an hour ago. We immediately - me and our regional manager Oleg Stepanov, who flew with me, he is involved in the Far East - began receiving endless calls. That is, an attempt to block a mobile phone. We were stopped on the highway as soon as we drove 800 meters from the airport. Like, the car is stolen. We checked the car for half an hour and decided that no, it was not stolen. Then they checked everyone’s passports and rewrote their passports.

Overall, it looks like they are going to disrupt the opening. If they had a command to detain him, they would have already detained him. And we are talking about disrupting it. Now we are driving further along the highway, there are still three posts ahead. Well, if they spend an hour on each of us, it means I won’t have time to get there physically. But at the same time, we have a plan B, and that’s okay.

The most unpleasant thing that they have done so far is that after our e-mail newsletter with an invitation, they call on some phones... it turns out that they have a partial base of supporters, apparently, they removed it from the SMS gateways of our previous mailings... They sent out text messages with the wrong address to our supporters. Accordingly, I would like to address you via the air: friends, the address in the e-mail newsletter is correct, the opening will take place at 18:30 at the address to which you were invited by e-mail. We are doing everything to make it happen.

In general, I think that in an hour on the Vladivostok highway from the airport to the city we learned everything - both about the rating of Governor Miklushevsky and the confidence of his position, since he takes such measures; and about the investment attractiveness of the region... what can we talk about if any person who arrives begins to be detained...

That is, everything here is wildly based on nerves, on betrayal... We have never seen anything like this, frankly speaking. I wanted to say that we haven’t seen anything like this even in the southern regions, but then I remembered that Vladivostok is the southernmost of our headquarters, it is south of Krasnodar and Rostov-on-Don, so maybe it has something to do with this...

About the opening of Alexei Navalny’s headquarters in Vladivostok - Leonid Volkov - Interview - Ekho Moskvy, 05/15/2017