Demonstration comes after court gave Putin critic suspended sentence but jailed his brother for three and a half years

The Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was arrested on Tuesday after breaking house arrest to join an opposition rally in Moscow, hours after a court gave him a suspended sentence for fraud. His brother, Oleg, was jailed for three and a half years for the same offence.

Police arrested Navalny soon after he emerged from the metro. Officers detained him outside the Ritz Carlton hotel, in Tverskaya street, before he had a chance to join demonstrators trying to reach the heavily guarded Manezh square, directly in front of the Kremlin.

Thousands of protesters gathered in freezing conditions to protest against the verdict on Navalny and his brother. They chanted anti-Putin slogans including: “No Putin, no war”, “Crimea is not ours”, “Putin is a thief” and “freedom”. More than 100 protesters were arrested, including a Wall Street Journal reporter, and loaded into waiting buses, to cries of “shame!”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk band, has released a video calling for a protest against the Navalny verdict outside the Kremlin.

“Look how much they fear us, as if we were enemies. Navalny and [Russian president Vladimir] Putin are now real enemies. Today’s verdict made Alexei very angry,” Svetlana Guseva, an oncologist and longtime opposition activist, said. “Anger will make us stronger,” she added.

Some of those detained tweeted photos from inside police vans. Navalny tweeted that officials had taken him to a police station and then taken him back to his flat. Five police guards stood outside his door to prevent him from leaving again.

In a case which critics say was politically motivated, the judge earlier handed Navalny – Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile opponent – a suspended three-and-a-half-year sentence. He had faced up to 10 years in jail. But in an unexpected move, the court jailed Oleg Navalny and sent him to a penal colony.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Policemen detain a supporter of Alexei Navalny during the rally. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov /EPA

It was unclear whether Alexei Navalny now faces a similar term behind bars after deliberately breaking his bail conditions on Tuesday. He is under house arrest following an earlier conviction. Setting off to the demonstration, he tweeted from the metro: “Yes, there is this house arrest. But today I want to be with you. So I’m coming too.”

Navalny’s supporters said Tuesday’s verdict showed the Kremlin was returning to the Soviet-era practice of punishing the relatives of those it disliked.

Both men were found guilty of stealing 30m roubles (about £334,000 under the current exchange rate) from the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Asked by the judge, Yelena Korobchenko, if the rulings against them were clear, Alexei replied: “Nothing is clear. Why are you imprisoning my brother? By this you punish me even harder.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A group of police officers detain one of Alexei Navalny’s supporters at the rally. Photograph: Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA

The sentencing had originally been scheduled for 15 January, but was abruptly brought forward to the day before New Year’s Eve, the main Russian holiday, in an apparent attempt to prevent large-scale anti-Putin demonstrations. Riot police and military vehicles flooded Manezh Square in anticipation of protests. The authorities had not given permission for the rally, so it was considered illegal.

“Of all the possible types of sentence, this is the meanest,” said Alexei Navalny outside court after his brother was taken away. “The government isn’t just trying to jail its political opponents – we’re used to it, we’re aware that they’re doing it – but this time they’re destroying and torturing the families of the people who oppose them,” he said.

Writing on his blog,, Navalny said his brother’s sentence would not stop him from political activity. He lambasted those at the top of Kremlin power as “thieves, scoundrels and traitors who must be destroyed”. He also said ordinary Russians were guilty of allowing the political elite to plunder the country. “We let them through our passivity,” he wrote.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Live stream of the demonstration in Moscow.

Critics said the move was the latest attempt by the Kremlin to shut down Navalny’s long-running anti-corruption campaign against Putin. Navalny’s friend, the opposition leader Ilya Yashin, said: “By taking his own brother as a political hostage, the sinister Kremlin wants to squash Navalny’s spirit, so he shuts up.”

The editor-in-chief of the liberal radio Echo of Moscow, Aleksei Venedictov, described the Kremlin’s perceived new strategy against Navalny as “sophisticated torture”.

“The verdict is purely political. The Kremlin weakens Alexei by giving him thousands of little wounds. First they keep him for months under house arrest, forbid him to use the internet, then put him on trial, then throw his brother in jail – taking family members hostage is a sensational new strategy,” Venediktov told the Guardian.

Alexei Navalny (right) and his brother Oleg. In a move that stunned Alexei’s supporters, the court gave him a suspended sentence while sending Oleg to a penal colony. Photograph: Korotayev Artyom/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

Oleg Navalny is the father of two small children and a former executive of the state-owned postal service. Unlike his better-known brother, he has never played a role in the Russian opposition movement. His imprisonment in a penal colony seems to echo the Soviet-era practice of arresting the relatives of inconvenient people.

The EU condemned Tuesday’s guilty verdict and said the case against the two brothers “appears to be politically motivated”. It said the trial had failed to substantiate the charges against them.

The Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in jail before he was pardoned last year, dismissed the verdict as Putin’s revenge for Navalny’s activism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This sign at the rally to support the Navalny brothers reads: ‘Free Navalny’. Photograph: Novoderezhkin Anton/Itar-Tass/Corbis

Khodorkovsky said in a statement that he was “not even surprised that Putin and his entourage are capable of vile tricks, deception, forgery and manipulation. They are not capable of anything else.”

Hugh Williamson, Europe and central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said the sentencing might have been designed to warn off other Putin critics.

“The sentence, and the imprisoning of his brother, Oleg Navalny, seems aimed not only at punishing Alexei Navalny himself and stopping his anti-corruption work, but also intimidating other critics of the government,” he said.

“The Kremlin seems to be telling independent voices to expect a harsher crackdown in 2015. Many factors point to political motivations in the case against Alexei and Oleg Navalny.

“By moving up the verdict, the Russian authorities apparently sought to diminish planned demonstrations. They also pushed those planning to protest [against] a guilty verdict to the margins of the law, by denying them enough time to comply with local regulations.”