The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has arrived in Moscow after being released from custody, declaring that he is going to win the capital's mayoral election.
Speaking through a bullhorn to hundreds of supporters at Moscow's Yaroslavsky station on Saturday, Navalny thanked them for their help in winning his release while an appeal is heard against his five-year sentence for embezzlement.
"I realise that if it wasn't for you I wouldn't be standing here for the next five years. You have destroyed a key privilege that the Kremlin has been trying to keep that it is their alleged right to say to any person: 'Arrest him on the spot,'" said Navalny, who claims that the case against him was concocted for political reasons.
Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement on Thursday in Kirov, but prosecutors unexpectedly asked for his release the next morning. They said that keeping him behind bars during the appeals process of his conviction would deprive him of his right to run for office.
A day before the conviction, Navalny, 37, was registered as a candidate for the 8 September Moscow mayoral election, running against the incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin. Navalny's support is mostly limited to the urban middle class and youth.
An opinion survey in early July by the independent Levada polling centre showed Navalny attracting only about 8% support among voters in the mayoral election.
Hundreds of police blocked Navalny supporters from the platform of the Moscow railway station where his overnight train from Kirov arrived, but Navalny shouted over the police lines: "We are going to run in this election and we will win". His supporters replied: "We are the power."
Navalny, a lawyer and blogger, is one of the most visible and charismatic leaders of the opposition to Putin and the governing United Russia party. His description of United Russia as the "party of crooks and thieves" has become a signature phrase of the opposition.
The Kremlin denies clamping down on critics or using the courts to persecute them. Putin remains Russia's most popular politician despite the largest wave of street protests against his 13-year rule that were led by Navalny in 2011-12.