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Russian candidate returns unhurt

Just as bizarrely as he disappeared last week, a Russian presidential candidate reappeared on Tuesday, alive and well, if obviously wan and confused about the fuss he had caused.

"I decided last week to take a break from all the bustle around me," the politician, Ivan Rybkin, told the Interfax news agency from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, by way of explaining his disappearance, which terrified his family and his campaign aides and prompted a police manhunt.

"I left fruit and money for my wife, who is now occupied with the grandchildren," he said, "but didn't say anything to her, changed my jacket, got on the train and left for Kiev."

Rybkin, a former speaker of parliament who is one of six candidates standing against President Vladimir Putin in an election now barely a month away, returned on Tuesday night to Sheremetyevo Airport, outside Moscow. There he faced a group of waiting journalists and only deepened the mystery of his abrupt hiatus.

"Such tyranny as now, I have not seen or experienced in my 15 years in politics," he said, echoing an anti-Putin theme he raised with increasing vigor in the days before he disappeared. Then he went on: "Tyranny is tyranny. Tyranny in Africa is tyranny, only there they eat people."

Rybkin's whereabouts managed to roil, if briefly and in the end farcically, a political race whose outcome is universally considered a foregone conclusion.

But the issues he hoped to raise against Putin -- such as the state of democracy and liberal reforms in today's Russia -- have been drowned out in the furor following his disappearance.

His disappearance raised fears that something untoward had happened to him, prompting speculation that he had been a victim of politically motivated violence. In the days before he left, he openly criticized Putin for cultivating close ties with business tycoons and eroding democratic freedoms in Russia.

In brief remarks before driving from the airport in a van, Rybkin expressed contrition over the anxiety he had caused his family and campaign workers, and suggested that he might soon end his presidential campaign, which was a longer-than-long shot from the start.

Rybkin was never going to defeat Putin, but Kseniya Ponomaryova, Rybkin's campaign chairwoman, said his actions had done "a lot of harm" to his campaign and his credibility. She said she was pleased he was safe, but did not expect to continue to work for his campaign.
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