Protest leader Aleksey Navalny has been freed pending appeal along with co-defendent Pyotr Ofitserov on the condition they adhere to travel restrictions. The court ruled Navalny may run in the Moscow mayoral elections despite charges set against him.
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Although Navalny is legally able to run in the September
elections, the opposition blogger said he had not yet decided
whether he would carry on with his mayoral campaign.
Navalny was released from custody on Thursday morning and was
greeted by a crowd of enthralled supporters outside the
courtroom. According to restrictions imposed by the court,
Navalny will not be permitted to leave the Russian capital upon
his return home. The district court where he is being tried is
located in the town of Kirov, around a kilometer East of
Moscow.
“I am not like a pet kitten or a puppy that you can abandon and then take back,” said the politician upon being released.
“We had a breather and now back to work. Campaigning, stands,
leaflets – this is what we need. A campaign doesn’t run
itself,” he later wrote on Twitter.
Russian political analyst Dmitry Babich believes Navalny hardly
has any chance of winning the mayoral election in Moscow as his
program is not very different from that of Sergey Sobyanin, the
incumbent Moscow mayor. Both candidates appear to be promising
Muscovites similar things, like “making everything electronic or
switching to market methods of running the city economy”. He also
argues some of Navalny’s nationalistic rhetoric has already cost
him supporters.
“I think that when the Western press depicts Navalny in rosy
colors, as a liberal, a humanist and all these things, it is a
simplification, because he was expelled from the liberal Yabloko
party for nationalist deviations. I think that the secret of his
success is that he is an average young Russian entrepreneur, not
squeaky-clean maybe, you know, a little nationalistic, striving
for economic freedom, so I think that he has some support. But,
of course it’s not massive support, it’s not millions of
people,” Babich told RT.
The prominent opposition figure spent a night in prison after the
court sentenced him to five years on corruption charges.
Following yesterday’s ruling Navalny’s supporters gathered in
central Moscow’s Manezhnaya Square to protest what they condemn
as a politically motivated trial. The court addressed Navalny’s
allegations of political foul play as “groundless” during
Thursday’s hearing.
Russian riot police detained dozens of protesters during unauthorized but peaceful rallies held in several Russian cities following the ruling.
Around 2,500 supporters of the anti-corruption blogger Navalny took to the streets in the heart of Russia’s capital for an unauthorized rally, according to Moscow police. The organizers of the protest however put the number of participants at over 10,000.
The Moscow police issued a statement on Friday morning, saying
that all of the citizens who had been arrested during the
protests had been released. The statement said that around 200
people had been detained in the center for blocking streets and
disobeying the police.