Anti-corruption campaigner and Vladimir Putin adversary faces 30 days in jail ahead of election
Alexei Navalny said on Twitter: ‘I don’t understand what happened, and why it took seven people to detain me.’
The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been detained by police then released weeks ahead of a presidential election in which he has been barred from running.
The 41-year-old anti-corruption campaigner has been jailed repeatedly for organising some of Russia’s biggest protests in recent years against what he says are the gilded lives of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle.
He has been barred from running in the 18 March election over what his supporters say is a trumped-up suspended prison sentence, and he has called for a nationwide boycott of the vote aimed at undermining Putin’s legitimacy.
Putin is widely expected to win the election by a landslide whatever the turnout, and secure a fourth term in the Kremlin.
Navalny said on Twitter that police had detained him on Thursday as he left an appointment with his dentist. He said they had released him just under an hour later, but had started legal proceedings against him for organising illegal protests.
“They offered me a lift somewhere, but I declined and have gone to work. I don’t understand what happened, and why it took seven people to detain me,” he said.
If found guilty, Navalny faces up to 30 days in jail.
Alexei Navalny attends a rally in Moscow in January for which he was later sentenced to 10 days in jail.
His detention came shortly after his campaign chief, Leonid Volkov, also said on Twitter that he had been detained by police at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow.
A spokeswoman for Navalny said Volkov was still being held.
Tweeting before his detention, Navalny said Volkov had been planning to fly to the Russian regional republic of Bashkortostan to organise election-monitoring activities.
Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said the head of the opposition campaigner’s Anti-Corruption Foundation had been sentenced to 10 days in jail on Tuesday for organising an unsanctioned protest in January.
The latest detentions came ahead of a march on Sunday in memory of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down three years ago on a bridge near the Kremlin.
Navalny has faced a string of administrative and criminal charges that he and his supporters see as politically motivated since he became the leading opposition figure campaigning against Putin’s rule at mass rallies in 2011 and 2012
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