Yegor Chernyuk at the police station last night. Photo: Ekaterina Moshonkina/@ekatepooha

by Sarah Hurst

Alexei Navalny’s campaign coordinator in Kaliningrad, Yegor Chernyuk, was sentenced to 10 days in prison today in connection with his participation in the rally for an election boycott on January 28. Chernyuk and his deputy coordinator, Oleg Alexeyev, were detained yesterday after a search at the local campaign offices. Alexeyev was released later, but Chernyuk was held in a police station overnight, OVD-Info reported.

This morning at about 10 am eight men came to the campaign offices and forced volunteers to leave, then changed the locks on the doors. The volunteers immediately rented a conference room in a shopping centre, but two hours later they were chased out of there too, and told that their contract to rent the room had been cancelled.

Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, visited annexed Crimea triumphantly and made a brief appearance in front of a crowd in Sevastopol after making them wait for hours. He congratulated them on returning to their “motherland”. Putin also viewed the bridge that is being constructed to join the peninsula with Russia. In the UK, Theresa May announced that she would expel 23 Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and suspend high-level diplomatic contacts with Russia. The Russian embassy responded by tweeting a picture of a thermometer showing plunging temperatures.