Hours after the Central Elections Commission on Saturday approved the presidential candidacy of a liberal who has been harshly critical of President Vladimir Putin, his campaign staff said he had gone missing for nearly two days.
Kseniya Ponomaryova, head of Ivan Rybkin's campaign group, told reporters that Rybkin had been unreachable since late Thursday, but declined to give details. Under Russian law, a missing persons report can be filed after three days without contact.
The news agency Interfax quoted Rybkin's wife as also saying that his relatives had not been able to contact him for two days.
The approval of Rybkin's candidacy brings the field for the March 14 election to five including Putin, although the commission has until Sunday to decide on the bids of two other potential candidates. Any candidate running without party affiliation must submit 2 million signatures in support and the commission is assessing the signatures' validity.
Putin is the overwhelming favorite in the election and the other candidacies are seen largely as symbolic stances. Opposition politicians had discussed boycotting the presidential election as a show of protest against the alleged unfairness of December's parliamentary election, and the other candidates in the presidential vote are relatively little-known.
The parliamentary election, in which the pro-Putin United Russia party won a two-thirds majority -- sufficient to change the constitution -- was criticized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for state media campaign coverage slanted toward pro-Putin forces and for alleged government pressure on news media, especially in the provinces, to limit coverage of opposition views.
Rybkin this week unofficially launched his campaign with a full-page open letter in the newspaper Kommersant accusing Putin of being Russia's most powerful oligarch and of ruling by fear. In the letter, Rybkin said power and money is inseparable under dictatorship and claimed to have information linking Putin to big business.
Rybkin, a national security council chief under President Boris Yeltsin, in recent years has pushed for talks between the Kremlin and Chechen rebels on ending the fighting in the republic. Putin firmly refuses to countenance negotiations.
He has been supported by Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire who was a powerful Kremlin insider in the Yeltsin years but who fell out with Putin and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom.
Although Rybkin's candidacy was approved, an elections commission spokesman said the commission found tens of thousands of apparently counterfeit signatures among the submissions and has sent evidence on the matter to prosecutors.
It was not clear what penalties Rybkin or his supporters could face in the matter.
Along with Rybkin and Putin, other candidates include Sergei Mironov, speaker of the upper house of parliament, who says he is running not to challenge Putin but to support him.
The Communist and ultranationalist Liberal Democratic parties did not field their traditional well-known candidates -- party leaders Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky -- but are running less-prominent candidates.
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