Volunteers working for opposition leader Alexei Navalny clashed with police on Saturday in the Kostroma region during a public speaking event in the city’s central October Square.

Following a confrontation between Navalny’s volunteers and local authorities, the deputy coordinator of Navalny’s campaign in Kostroma suffered a light head injury, which Navalny’s team said was inflicted by a plainclothes police officer, the 7x7 outlet reported.

Seven Navalny volunteers were also detained on Sunday in a separate incident in the Murmansk region for distributing flyers in the city center, the regional coordinator of the opposition leader's headquarters told OVD-Info. The news came as Navalny’s legal problems mounted over the week. On Friday, a Moscow court handed Navalny an additional one-year suspended sentence, upholding a request from the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter. In February, Navalny was given a five-year suspended sentence for embezzling funds from a logging company in the Kirov region. In response to Friday’s ruling, Navalny was cited by the Interfax news agency as criticizing the court’s ruling. “There is no objective reason why my sentence should be extended. I am a law-abiding citizen,” said. “However, extending my sentence, prevents me from running [for the presidency]. The ruling ensures Navalny will be legally barred from running in next year's presidential elections. In an interview with CBS, Navalny said that a chemical attack in May which nearly left him blind had been organized by the Russian government.

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