Putin foe seized after dentist trip
Police detained Russia’s main opposition leader as he came out of a dental surgery yesterday, less than a month before the presidential election.
Alexei Navalny, 41, wrote on Twitter that he had gone to a dentist with a toothache, and when he came out he was seized by police.
On Instagram he posted a photograph of himself in the back of a police van with three officers. ‘‘The sad face is not because I was detained but because my tooth hurts – the detention took place right at the exit from the dentist’s. Good thing they didn’t run in and pull me out from under the drill,’’ he said.
Navalny, a lawyer and anticorruption campaigner, later wrote that he had been taken to a police station in the Yakimanka district of Moscow, and released after being told he was suspected of a repeat administrative offence, which carries a possible custodial sentence of 30 days.
The alleged offence was not immediately clear, but it is likely to relate to his part in a protest on January 28.
Navalny has been seized on numerous occasions in the past and sentenced to spells of a few
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days or weeks of ‘‘administrative arrest’’, or custody, for organising anti-Kremlin rallies that were not endorsed by the authorities. He accuses President Vladimir Putin of using pliant police and courts to suppress him as a political opponent.
In an interview last week, he said he expected to be in custody for the presidential election on March 18, from which he has been barred from standing.
Navalny was detained at a rally in Moscow last month that called for Russians to boycott the election. Police released him without charge but he said in the interview: ‘‘They could revive this at any moment, and I expect they will do so to ensure I am in custody at the time of the election.’’ If he were given a 30-day custodial sentence this week, he would be behind bars until after the election.
Putin is seeking a fourth term as president, and is expected to win with a huge majority against seven weak opponents endorsed by the authorities.
Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, was also detained yesterday at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. – The Times