Putin Foe Found
The Russian presidential candidate, missing since last week, has been located in neighboring Ukraine and will return to Russia Tuesday night, a campaign staffer said.
Ivan Rybkin, a critic of President Vladimir Putin who has been supported by one of the president's most outspoken foes, self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, had been missing since late Thursday, after being dropped off outside his Moscow home, according to his wife and campaign staffers.
A campaign staffer who gave her name only as Maria confirmed a Russian media report that Rybkin had been found and was to return to Moscow on a flight Tuesday night. His wife, Albina, said she could not immediately confirm the report.
She and Rybkin staffers filed a missing-person report on the 57-year-old on Sunday, the day after his candidacy for the March 14 presidential election was approved by the Central Election Commission.
Russian prosecutors on Monday launched and then quickly ended a murder investigation into Rybkin's disappearance.
A national security council chief under President Boris Yeltsin, Rybkin 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.
Berezovsky is one of several wealthy Russian businessmen known as "oligarchs" — men who made vast fortunes during the period when state-controlled Soviet industries were privatized.
Amid public resentment of the oligarchs' wealth, Putin has targeted some of them for alleged corruption. But critics note that Putin's campaign has also targeted magnates who control some of Russia's independent media, raising concerns about freedom of the press.
Rybkin last 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.
Putin has remained Russia's most popular politician since his 2000 election. Recent opinion surveys have shown about 80 percent of respondents saying they would vote for Putin.
Putin appears so confident of being re-elected that he has said that he will not participate in television debates or use free airtime. That goes along with the image he cultivated in his first election as a strong leader who doesn't need conventional advertising.
But regardless, Russia's state-controlled television attentively and glowingly covers Putin's every move.
The report of Rybkin's disappearance came as a trial was under way in Moscow over the murder of Berezovksy opponent and Liberal Russia party leader Sergei Yushenkov, who was gunned down last April, according to the Moscow Times.