Search begins for missing Russian candidate
MOSCOW -- Russian authorities began a search for presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin after his wife filed a missing person report, a police official said yesterday.
"We lost contact with Rybkin on Thursday night," Ksenia Ponomareva, his campaign manager, told reporters yesterday outside the central Moscow police station where the report was filed. "We can't reach any of his cellphone numbers, and he hasn't returned home."
Rybkin is a strident critic of President Vladimir V. Putin, accusing the Russian leader of "state crimes" and the destruction of democracy in Russia. Political analysts say Rybkin, one of seven officially registered candidates, would get only a tiny fraction of the vote in the March 14 election; Putin has repeatedly been forecast to take 60 percent to 70 percent.
In the 1990s, Rybkin was a senior figure in the government of President Boris Yeltsin, serving as head of the National Security Council, chairman of Parliament's lower house, and chief negotiator with Chechen rebels.
He has held no senior government posts since Putin became president in 2000.
Recently, he has resurfaced in the Moscow political world, allied with the tycoon Boris Berezovsky, a Putin opponent who fled the country after being accused of fraud.
Berezovsky was cited yesterday by the Interfax news service as saying that he was certain no harm had come to Rybkin. Police, meanwhile, visited the candidate's house and office as part of their search.
In the days before his reported disappearance, Rybkin's candidacy was thrown into question by claims from the Central Election Commission that about 26 percent of the signatures on his nominating petitions were invalid, in some cases due to forgery.
Speaking to Ekho Moskvy radio Thursday, Rybkin called the claims politically motivated. He said authorities had searched his campaign office and confiscated computers and paper documents.
The commission officially registered his candidacy last weekend, but left open the possibility of disqualifying it.
In the past four years, Putin has increased state control of the media, recentralized authority in Moscow, and given positions of power to fellow KGB veterans. The country's richest man, former Yukos oil company head Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is being prosecuted as part of what many people see as a response to his political challenges to Putin.
On Tuesday, in a full-page advertisement in Kommersant, a newspaper owned by Berezovsky, Rybkin issued a broadside against the president.
"People, come to your senses!" he declared. "The actions of President Putin and those close to him ought to be seen by society as state crimes. The constitution has been effectively demolished, and once again Russia is plunging into darkness. A war has been unleashed in Chechnya, and an entire nation is being exterminated."
