Navalny’s Vladivostok campaign headquarters search by National Guard SWAT team

Alexei Navalny’s Vladivostok campaign headquarters were ransacked by a SWAT from Russia’s national guard Rosgvardiya in connection with the anti-corruption protests that swept Russia on March 26. Navalny’s national campaign chief Leonid Volkov made this announcement on Facebook on Friday.

The SWAT team came to Navalny’s campaign coordinator Sofia Kryvtsova at 6 am and said that she would be a witness in a case on an attack on a police officer. Her mobile devices and laptop were confiscated on suspicion that she attended and filmed one of the rallies and, therefore, had footage of it.

Volkov said that the campaign headquarters in Vladivostok had been searched on two previous occasions. Each time, the premises were visited with warrants related to criminal cases.

The Vladivostok headquarters are scheduled for opening on May 15. The opening of Navalny’s regional campaign headquarters is almost always accompanied by attacks or provocation. In Nizhny Novgorod, the doors of the headquarters were filled with mounting foam; in Tomsk, the headquarters were evacuated because of a bomb scare; and, in Krasnodar, the headquarters were attacked by people in Cossack uniforms.

On March 26, Anti-corruption protests swept nearly one hundred cities across Russia, following the March 2 publication of Navalny’s report into the property of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Most of the rallies were not pre-approved by city authorities. According to various sources, the protests attracted anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 people. More than a thousand protesters were detained in Moscow alone.