Police in Moscow detained Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition politician and anti-corruption crusader, on Friday, hours before he was to address his supporters at a pre-election rally in a major provincial city.

Vladimir Putin has not yet revealed whether he will stand for re-election at the Russian presidential poll in March 2018. But Mr Navalny, who declared his candidacy late last year, is already battling a barrage of official harassment to take his campaign to Russia’s far-flung regions.

Police detained Mr Navalny early on Friday as he left his Moscow flat to travel by train to Nizhny Novgorod, an industrial city 480km east of Moscow, to attend a rally of his supporters. “Old man Putin doesn’t want me to go to Nizhny Novgorod,” the opposition leader wrote on Instagram.

The Russian ministry of interior said Mr Navalny had been detained over “repeated calls to attend an unauthorised public event”. If the charge is upheld in court, he could could face a fine of 150,000 -300,000 rubles (€2,200- €4,400) or a 30-day jail sentence.

A lawyer who swept to political prominence after leading massive anti-government protests that erupted in Moscow in 2011-2012, after a falsified parliamentary election, Mr Navalny is widely considered to be the only opposition figure capable of presenting a genuine challenge to Mr Putin at the polls.

Campaign promise

Large crowds have turned out at rallies across Russia in September to hear his simple campaign promise to redistribute the wealth monopolised by corrupt officials and oligarchs and give ordinary citizens a better life.

From Nizhny Novgorod, Mr Navalny was planning to address meetings in the city of Orenburg in southern Russia and Arkhangelsk in the northwest this weekend before moving on to a rally in Saint Petersburg on October 7th.

Russia’s central election commission warned earlier this year that Mr Navalny, who is serving a five-year sentence for fraud – a charge he says was politically motivated – is unlikely to be allowed to compete in the 2018 presidential poll.

But the unexpectedly high level of popular support for Mr Navalny’s election campaign will make it difficult for the Kremlin to bar the opposition leader from the polls without risking social unrest.

Destabilise

Valentina Matvienko, the speaker of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, signalled concern this week, telling lawmakers that Russia should be prepared to combat attempts to destabilise the country in the coming months. Her message echoed a warning by the Russian foreign ministry that said the US might interfere in the forthcoming election by supporting anti-Kremlin protests.

Writing from a police cell in Moscow on Friday afternoon, Mr Navalny urged his supporters to attend the Nizhny Novgorod rally as a “sign of protest against the stupidity, senility and degradation that has taken hold of our country”.

But in Nizhny Novgorod, where police detained Leonid Volkov, Mr Navalny’s campaign manager, on Friday, the authorities were not taking any chances. A sports event was hastily organised to take place on Friday evening in the very same square where the opposition rally was planned.