(Bloomberg) -- Police dragged away Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny on Thursday during a raid on the Moscow offices of his Anti-Corruption Foundation in a continuing crackdown on critics of President Vladimir Putin, later releasing him.
“They took Alexey away by force,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter. The police action, involving masked officers in helmets, appeared to be aimed at preventing Navalny’s organization from airing a regular evening program Thursday that got 1.4 million views the previous week, said Leonid Volkov, an aide to the opposition leader.
“They chose this day, obviously, because I was due to be appearing live on a broadcast,” Navalny said, adding that there were no arrests. He broadcast the raid live on Twitter.
Another Navalny ally, Ruslan Shaveddinov, 23, was conscripted for compulsory military service in a remote Arctic base earlier this week. Authorities flew him to Novaya Zemlya after breaking into his Moscow apartment on Monday, in what supporters denounced as a state abduction reminiscent of Soviet times.
Putin in mid-2019 faced the biggest protests since his return to the presidency in 2012 over the refusal to register opposition candidates for local elections in Moscow. In addition to sweeping arrests and jail sentences for protest participants, Russia targeted Navalny’s foundation with a money-laundering investigation and listed it as a “foreign agent.”
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