Putin critic dragged from office in raid

Kremlin targets Navalny and his opposition allies to keep dissenters at bay Alexei Navalny is the most prominent opponent of the Russian government.

MOSCOW— In Russian authorities’ latest crackdown this week on Kremlin critics, opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s AntiCorruption Foundation office was raided Thursday, just days after one of his top aides was suddenly conscripted and sent to a desolate base in the Arctic.

Navalny, who was barred from running in Russia’s 2018 presidential election, said on Twitter that he was dragged out of the office before eventually being allowed to return.

In the moments before his brief detention, Navalny livestreamed the raid as police used power tools to saw through the door.

“They picked the day not by chance — I was supposed to go on the air,” Navalny said on Twitter, referring to his YouTube channel.

There have been multiple raids on Navalny’s office this year, and he wrote on Instagram that the official reason for this one was related to his group’s refusal to take down a 2017 YouTube documentary that investigated alleged corruption involving Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

A criminal case was opened against Ivan Zhdanov, director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, as a result, and Thursday’s search was apparently part of the investigation of that case, Navalny said.

Navalny says he will not take down the video, which has garnered more than 32 million views.

Navalny is Russia’s most prominent and vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, which has made him and his allies targets of the Kremlin’s methods for keeping dissenters at bay.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that the multiple arrests of Navalny violated his rights and appeared to be part of a broader effort “to bring the opposition under control.”

The activist spent 30 days in prison earlier this year after advocating a major rally.

The raid on his office comes less than a week after Ruslan Shaveddinov, a 23-year-old project manager for Navalny’s anti-corruption group, was forcibly conscripted into military service and flown to Novaya Zemlya, a group of islands in the Arctic so remote that the Soviet Union once conducted nuclear tests there.

Military service is mandatory for Russian men, who are drafted for a year sometime between the ages of 18 and 27. But in a blog post on his website, Navalny claimed that Shaveddinov has a documented medical issue that should exempt him from serving.

Shaveddinov had pressed that case in a Moscow court earlier this year, but the decision to draft him was upheld Monday, the same day the door to his apartment was found smashed in and his cellphone’s SIM card was disabled.

Navalny has likened Shaveddinov’s conscription to kidnapping and imprisonment, adding that although he is not literally behind bars, he has a permanent minder.

“Service in the army has turned into a prison mechanism,” Navalny wrote on Twitter.

Asked about Shaveddinov’s conscription and the optics of it, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday, “If he tried to evade military service and was drafted the way it was done, then it happened in strict compliance with the law.”

The raid on Navalny’s office was not the only newsworthy one in Moscow on Thursday. Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s biggest opposition newspaper, said in a statement that security forces “broke into” the apartment of reporter Yulia Polukhina.

The newspaper said it believes the search was related to Polukhina’s recent investigations of “illegal military units” in eastern Ukraine, where Russianbacked separatists have been at war with Ukrainian forces since 2014, and smuggling.