MOSCOW: A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced Ilya Yashin, one of the last Russian opposition figures remaining in the country, to 15 days in detention.
"The Khamovniki court has just sent me to jail for 15 days," Yashin said on Twitter. He had earlier been detained for disobeying police.
Speaking in court, Yashin, 38, said he did not resist the police.
He insisted that the case against him was politically motivated and an apparent attempt to push him out of the country and intimidate him.
"This detention is a way to put pressure on me," he said in comments released on messaging app Telegram.
He said he did not rule out that the detention was also an attempt to launch a criminal case against him in the future.
Yashin was arrested late on Monday while he was strolling through a Moscow park with his friend Irina Babloyan, the latter wrote on Telegram.
"They say that he insulted (the police) and swore during his arrest. IT IS NOT TRUE," she wrote.
Yashin has been a prominent opposition figure in Russia since the mass protests against President Vladimir Putin in 2011-2012.
He is an ally of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny and was close to Boris Nemtsov, an opposition politician assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
He is a city deputy and has denounced Russia's offensive in Ukraine.
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