This content was published on 01 Jun 2021 – 22:37
01.June 2021 – 22:37

MOSCOW (Reuters). Dmitry Gudkov, a prominent opposition politician and former member of parliament, was detained by Russian police on Tuesday, TASS reported, as part of a crackdown on Kremlin critics.

As a member of the lower house of parliament, Gudkov was expelled from the Fair Russia party in 2013 for helping to organize protests against the Kremlin. He later joined Russia’s liberal opposition and opposed President Vladimir Putin.

In a statement on social media on Tuesday, Gudkov, 41, said police were searching the house where he was staying and that he was also harassing former and current employees of his headquarters.

TASS, citing unnamed sources, said that Gudkov was detained for 48 hours on suspicion of non-payment of debts under a contract for a non-residential building between 2015 and 2017. Gudkov could remain in prison for up to five years if charged. found guilty by the court, TASS reports.

The arrest was the latest in widespread crackdowns on Kremlin opponents ahead of the September parliamentary elections. Opposition politician Alexei Navalny is the highest-ranking Kremlin critic in prison.

Earlier that day, Gudkov suggested on the social network Telegram that the reason the authorities wanted him was political. “I don’t know the formal reason for this,” Gudkov wrote. “But the real (reason) is clear.”

In addition, Russian authorities searched the apartment of opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov on Tuesday, the day after he was removed from the plane and taken into custody.

Police removed Pivovarov, director of the now defunct opposition group Open Russia, linked to former oil tycoon and ousted Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, from a flight that was due to depart from Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg to Warsaw on Monday night.

His team said the police interrogated him, searched his apartment and opened a criminal case against him on Tuesday on charges of violating Russian law on “unwanted organizations.”

“These situations show us that they are afraid of us, and we are in the majority,” Pivovarov’s Twitter account says.

The Investigative Committee in Krasnodar, a region in southern Russia, said in a statement that it began a lawsuit in response to a message in August 2020 asking the public to support Open Russia, Interfax reported.

The committee did not provide details about the post and did not mention Pivovarov, but did report the same statements made by his staff.

Russia declared London’s Open Russia an “unwanted” group in 2017, effectively banning its activities. His allies in Russia supported activism through a separate legal entity in an attempt to protect themselves from prosecution.

(Gabriel Tetro-Farber, Maxim Rodionov and Polina DeWitt in Moscow and Pavel Florkevich and Alan Charlish in Warsaw)