After 22-year-old opposition blogger is attacked in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman cautions against connecting incident to Navalny’s poisoning

Moscow police are investigating the assault and battery of 22-year-old blogger and radio host Egor Zhukov, who was attacked and beaten near his home late on August 30. A popular libertarian YouTuber, Zhukov became an oppositionist icon in the summer of 2019 when, for supposedly inciting acts of extremism, he was sentenced to three years of probation and prohibited from blogging for two years after a major protest on July 27, 2019. 

The two men who attacked Zhukov reportedly fled on scooters. Paramedics diagnosed him with a concussion and a skull injury. According to Ekho Moskvy editor-in-chief Alexey Venediktov, who gave Zhukov a job after his criminal conviction last year, doctors treated Zhukov for his injuries and discharged him from the hospital.

This isn’t the first time someone has attacked Zhukov: on July 27, 2020, two people in masks chased him, but he managed to escape without suffering serious injuries.

Speaking to the press on August 31, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged reporters not to connect the attack on Zhukov to the recent poisoning of opposition politician Alexey Navalny, who’s been in a coma since August 20 after becoming violently ill aboard a plane returning to Moscow from the city of Tomsk.