Alexey Navalny releases evidence that Russian police have secret orders to confiscate his campaign materials

Opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, published a photograph on August 22 of what he describes as bombshell evidence that Russian police coordinated an effort to seize campaign materials ahead of a national outreach weekend in early July.

“In any [other] country, this would be a Watergate [moment],” Volkov tweeted on Tuesday, attaching a photo allegedly showing a copy of an order issued by Igor Astrakhantsev, the head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Western Position Transport Control office.

Dated July 4, the document was reportedly distributed to city and regional Interior Ministry offices. Volkov says the photo in his tweet was taken at the Chernyakhovsk train station in Kaliningrad, but he offered no further details about how he obtained the image.

According to the document in Volkov’s tweet, agents in the Kaliningrad regional office of the Federal Security Service “received information” that Navalny’s headquarters planned to ship 16 tons of campaign newspapers and 2 million leaflets to the area (Volkov says this tip was accurate). The document also identifies the courier companies hired to deliver these supplies, and named Egor Chernyuk, the head of Navalny’s local campaign headquarters, as the shipment’s likely recipient.

“In the event that you detect this cargo, you are required to halt the cargo under any pretext and inform the Russian Interior Ministry’s Western Position Transport Control’s front office and regional Federal Security Service officer Mashanov of its detection,” the police document states.

On July 8 and 9, Alexey Navalny’s supporters carried out what they called a “Campaign Saturday,” spending the weekend hitting the streets, handing out Navalny’s campaign materials to passersby. In the days before this planned outreach project, police around the country raided Navalny’s campaign headquarters, confiscating campaign literature on various (often bogus) legal grounds.

Later, Navalny, Volkov, and Nikolai Lyaskin, the head of Navalny’s campaign office in Moscow, were fined 850,000 rubles ($14,400) for organizing the weekend effort. The court ruled that simultaneously distributing leaflets in different places constitutes the staging of a “secret kind of public event,” meaning that Navalny’s team needed a demonstration permit.

Alexey Navalny is running for president, hoping to find a spot on the ballot in March 2018. According to federal laws, however, he cannot stand for elected office, thanks to a suspended criminal sentence for misappropriating about $500,000 from a state-owned lumber company. Navalny denies the charges, and the European Court of Human Rights even ruled that his first conviction violated his right to a fair trial. In November 2016, Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the original 2013 sentence, but a Kirov district court repeated the verdict and sentence just three months later.