Navalny TV Show Host Shaveddinov Jailed For 30 Days

The host of the YouTube channel of jailed opposition politician and anticorruption campaigner Aleksei Navalny has been jailed for 30 days over nationwide protests against President Vladimir Putin.

Ruslan Shaveddinov was detained by police outside his Moscow home on May 22 and taken to the Tverskoy police station.

"Thirty days," Shaveddinov later wrote on Twitter from the court. "I will continue to encourage you to participate in the struggle for the future of our country."

A lawyer for Navalny's Anticorruption Foundation, Ivan Zhdanov, said Shaveddinov was accused of being among the organizers of a May 5 rally called by Navalny against Putin's reelection.

Navalny's press secretary, Kira Yarmysh, who went to the police station to represent Shaveddinov's interests, was herself detained, she tweeted on May 22.

On May 23, Yarmysh wrote that she was waiting for a hearing of her case at the Tverskoy District Court.

Under the slogan "He's not our tsar," Navalny, 41, had called on his supporters to take to the streets nationwide ahead of Putin's May 7 inauguration.

According to the independent police-monitoring group OVD-Info, which monitors arrests during mass protests, the court found that Shaveddinov organized the action with the help of a retweet of one of the broadcasts of his Cactus program on YouTube.

Independent TV channel Dozhd confirmed the detention of both Shaveddinov and Yarmysh for the "violation of administrative legislation."

OVD-Info said some 1,612 people, including Navalny himself, were detained in 26 cities in connection with the rally, some 7,000 of them in Moscow alone.

Navalny was initially released, but a Moscow court on May 15 ordered him to be jailed for 30 days after finding him guilty of repeatedly violating regulations for organizing public gatherings.

Shaveddinov's detention is the second in less than a week, after police in Moscow arrested him for a short period of time over the same accusation of involvement in the May 5 protests.

In January, both Yarmysh and Shaveddinov were sentenced to several days in jail for broadcasting Navalny-organized rallies calling for a boycott of the March 18 presidential election.

Putin, 65, has been president or prime minister since 1999.

He was reelected by a landslide on March 18, in a vote that he has called a demonstration of public trust but which critics say was marred by fraud and by what international observers said was the lack of a genuine choice.

With reporting by meduza.io and tvrain.ru