05 March 2004 10:22
Rybkin in Ukraine, says ready for election
Russian presidential hopeful Ivan Rybkin, who said he had been drugged and held against his will in Ukraine last month, told reporters in Kiev on Thursday he was ready to return to Moscow to challenge President Vladimir Putin.
Rybkin's mysterious disappearance just a month before the March 14 presidential polls briefly shook Russia's political world but soon turned into a farce – and is about to be staged as a musical by a vanguard Moscow theatre.
On the last leg of a trip to Ukraine, Russia, Britain and back to Ukraine, Rybkin said he stood by all the various statements he had made on why he went to Kiev without telling anyone, only to resurface five days later after a police manhunt.
He first said he had visited friends in Kiev, then stated that he had fled Russia in fear of his life, then said he was drugged and filmed in a "disgusting" video in a flat in Kiev. Most of the remarks Rybkin, 57, made at a Kiev news conference were met with laughter.
"I really need to be in Moscow now...Let's agree that all conversations about my election campaign should happen in Moscow because people are waiting for me. I will start those tomorrow," he told journalists in remarks punctuated by bursts of laughter and strong words of rebuke from his campaign manager. "All my statements (about the disappearance) remain the same, I again thank those kind people in Ukraine and about the rest – we'll figure it out in time."
Rybkin had previously said he would stay away from Russia until after the election in which he, like five other challengers, is unlikely to score solidly against President Vladimir Putin, whose popularity rating is nearly 80 percent.
Russian media have ridiculed his "adventure", and Moscow theatregoers will soon be able to take in a musical called "Ivan Rybkin's erotic adventures in Kiev", staged by Conceptual Theatre.
Putin's allies accused Rybkin of staging his own disappearance to win a sympathy vote for his doomed campaign.
In London, where he went to meet his sponsor, Putin's exiled arch-foe Boris Berezovsky, Rybkin told journalists he had gone to a Kiev flat in early February with strangers who said he would be meeting Chechnya's fugitive President Aslan Maskhadov. He said he awoke later to find two armed men beside him who showed him video films of himself and others that were intended to compromise him.
Ukraine opened a criminal investigation into the claims and Rybkin said some people had been jailed as a result.
After the news conference, an official from the prosecutor general's office presented Rybkin with a subpoena. He refused to take the document and drove off.
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