Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been detained after showing up at an unsanctioned rally against his own sentencing earlier in the day.
Navalny was seized by police outside the Ritz Carlton hotel in central Moscow and whisked away in a police van, according to online footage and eyewitnesses.
The vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin had ignored a house arrest order by trying to join a demonstration against a court ruling that found him guilty on corruption charges and gave him a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence in a case widely criticised as politically charged.
Riot police could be seen randomly detaining protesters, who braved freezing temperatures of -15C to support Navalny on Moscow's Tverskaya Street, a main thoroughfare next to the Kremlin.
One young woman sang a derogatory song about Putin, popular among pro-democracy protesters in Ukraine, while being dragged inside a police van.
More than 170 people were detained by 8pm local time, according to ovd.info, a human rights group that monitors police detentions in Russia.
Observers put the overall number of protesters at a few thousand, but exact numbers were hard to gauge as police constantly dispersed them into groups of a few hundred.
Navalny's supporters were especially incensed that the activist's brother, Oleg, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail on the same charges.
Oleg Navalny was arrested directly in the courtroom, according to the brothers' lawyer, Vadim Kobzev.
Navalny reacted with disgust to his brother's sentencing.
"Of all possible verdicts, this is the foulest," he wrote on Twitter.
Alexei Navalny will continue to serve pretrial house arrest until the full verdict is published, his lawyer Vadim Kobbzev said earlier, adding that he will appeal the brothers' verdicts.
It was not immediately clear what legal consequences his attempt to join the protest will have for Alexei Navalny, who already got a suspended sentence for five years in prison in a corruption trial in 2013.
Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky district court earlier found the Navalny brothers guilty of defrauding 27 million roubles (more than $A541,000 at the exchange rate at the time) from French cosmetics company Yves Rocher.
The judge did not read out the verdict's explanation, but prosecutors have argued that a company linked to the brothers offered freight services at above market prices and that Navalny used his "administrative resources" to force Yves Rocher to accept them.
The prosecutors had asked for 10 years in prison for Alexei Navalny and eight years for his brother.
Both brothers have called the charges fabricated.
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