Putin opponent ARRESTED: Russian police detain opposition leader outside Moscow home
RUSSIAN police have arrested the leader of the opposition party, Alexei Navalny and detained him without explanation, according to his spokeswoman as the Kremlin remains silent on the move.
Russian police detain opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow
Mr Navalny's spokesowman Kira Warmish tweeted: "Navalny was detained two hours ago outside his home. He is now in the (Moscow) Danilovsky police station.
“They did not say why he is being detained. They took his phone away.”
She then tweeted that police are refusing to grant Navalny access to a lawyer.
In a radio interview with Ekho Moskvy, Ms Yarmysh said the arrest was ”probably linked" to Navalny's plans to hold protests in September.
The opposition leader is intending to march against the Russian government's unpopular pension reform.
Mr Navalny wrote in a blog post that protests would take place in Moscow and "in almost a hundred other cities.”
It’s the first proposed pension hike in almost 90 years and the public have responded angrily after Vladimir Putin promised he would never do it.
The proposal would hike the pension age from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034.
More than 2.8 million Russians have signed a petition against the reform.
Mr Navalny, 41, has been arrested several times before for organising protests against the Kremlin.
He was jailed in May for 30 days because he organised nationwide protests against president Putin.
The protests were organised after Mr Navalny, along with 29 other opposition figures, was barred from running for president in the elections held in March this year.
The 41-year-old gathered 100,000 signatures which should have secured his place in the electoral race, but he was barred because of his criminal record.
He unsuccessfully called for voters to boycott the election.
The slogan he marched with is: “Putin is not our tsar [emperor]”, and he has been a vocal opponent of the Russian president’s iron grip over power.
Russian President Mr Putin, 65, blew his opposition away with landslide election results which cemented his authority in Russia for another six years.