Duntsova, a presidential candidate, was detained near Tver

Ekaterina Duntsova, who was running for president of Russia, was detained in Tver region on Sunday evening. This happened after the meeting of the organizing committee of the new party “Rassvet”. Earlier, Duntsova announced her intention to establish a party.

It is reported that law enforcement officers stopped the car driven by Duntsova, after which she was taken to a drug dispensary to check for the presence of narcotic substances in her blood. She was later released.

Duntsova herself, commenting on what happened, explained that “she was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” According to her, on the way from the meeting, her navigator hung up, she pulled over to the side of the road, and at that moment the police approached her: the car allegedly stopped in a place where the so-called “bookmarks” are distributed.

“The drug test gave a negative result, I have already been released,” Duntsova said. “I hope it’s just a misunderstanding,” she wrote in a telegram.

• Ekaterina Duntsova is a journalist from the city of Rzhev in the Tver Region, a former deputy of the Rzhev City Duma. In November, she announced that she was nominating her candidacy for the presidential election. She publicly spoke out for ending the war in Ukraine and against political repression in Russia.
• At the end of December, the CEC refused Duntsova to register her initiative group to start pre-election campaigning and collect signatures, thus effectively barring her from the elections. The commission referred first to formal violations in the preparation of documents, and then to the fact that the initiative group of voters, which at that time numbered several thousand Russians, “was not created.” Duntsova believes that she was not allowed to vote for political reasons. Many representatives of the opposition and experts investigating the Russian elections consider them to be obviously unfair and unfair, pointing out that the authorities are creating preferences for the current president, Vladimir Putin.
• After the refusal to register, Duntsova said that her supporters were planning to create a party. The first meeting of the organizing committee of the future party was held in Tver on January 14. Duntsova also called for help with the collection of signatures for presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin.
• Pro-Kremlin mass media claim that Duntsova is “financed by fugitive oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky”, but do not present any evidence of their claims. Many Russian opposition figures supported Duntsova, for example, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation Ivan Zhdanov and human rights activist Lev Ponomarev.