Missing Russian Turns Up; Questions Linger

Ivan Rybkin, a Russian presidential candidate who had been missing since Thursday, resurfaced Tuesday, giving confusing stories about what had happened and leaving it unclear whether his brief disappearance was a lark, a publicity stunt or a case of intimidation.

Upon arrival at a Moscow airport from Ukraine, Rybkin, wearing dark glasses, appeared weary and subdued. He gave the impression that something unpleasant had happened, and said he might drop out of the March balloting in which President Vladimir V. Putin is seeking reelection.

Rybkin, 57, a former national security chief, is seen as having no chance of defeating Putin, but his candidacy gives him a platform for criticizing the popular incumbent. He has been particularly negative about Putin’s hard-line policy in war-torn Chechnya. Under former President Boris N. Yeltsin, he was a peace negotiator with Chechen separatists.

Rybkin made only brief, cryptic comments upon arrival at the airport. “I have come back as if after a tough round of Chechnya talks,” he said.

He expressed strong disappointment that his daughter had been “crying very hard into the handset,” but did not explain when that had happened. “Thank God I am here now, on my own home turf,” he said.

Asked whether he had been held against his will, he replied: “It is very difficult to hold me. But I think that there are also some good people in Kiev, too, whom I am very grateful to.”

Rybkin disappeared from his home Thursday night, said his wife, who filed a missing person’s report Sunday. That evening she said she feared authorities were taking “revenge” on him because “he is not the greatest fan of the current regime.”

Police and security services launched a search, and on Monday prosecutors opened, then hours later dropped, a murder investigation, leading some observers to question whether higher authorities knew that Rybkin was alive.

The possibility that Rybkin had been the victim of a political killing was taken seriously in part because 10 members of parliament and a number of other prominent politicians or government officials have been killed in the last decade, with most of the cases unsolved. The trial of suspects in the 2003 killing of lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov opened Monday. The victim and two of the defendants were from rival factions of the same party as Rybkin, and he is expected to be a witness in that trial.

Rybkin’s comments upon his return to Moscow contrasted sharply in tone with statements he made earlier in the day by phone to the Russian news agency Interfax and to his campaign manager. Those initial statements portrayed his trip to Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, as a pleasant break from his hectic life in Moscow -- at least until he discovered Tuesday that his absence had caused an uproar.

It was not clear, however, whether he was alone and speaking entirely of his own free will when he made those phone calls.

“I have the right to two or three days of private life. I came to Kiev to visit my friends, had fun, turned off mobile phones and did not watch television,” he told Interfax. “I decided last week to take a break from all the bustle around me. I left my wife, who is taking care of grandchildren, fruit and money, but told her nothing, changed my jacket, got on the train and went to Kiev.”

Ksenia Ponomaryova, Rybkin’s campaign manager, told reporters before his return to Moscow that he gave her a similar explanation by telephone, but that she was not sure whether to believe it.

Liliya Shevtsova, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said before the candidate’s late-evening arrival in Moscow that “there is no certainty at all that Rybkin’s mysterious disappearance was just a publicity stunt.”

“No question, it does look very much like a stunt, indeed,” she said. “But there must be something more substantial behind this stunt. There must be a reason, for Rybkin does not look anything like a crazy lunatic.”

Shevtsova said that “something serious must have happened which forced him to dig his own political grave.”

“After what happened, he has been annihilated as a politician. He has erased himself. Or he has been erased by someone. The only question is who this eraser is.

“The bewildered public can only make assumptions as to who has erased Rybkin and why Rybkin has committed political suicide,” she said.

Boris Berezovsky, a wealthy Kremlin insider under Boris N. Yeltsin who now lives in London, is Rybkin’s key backer -- and one of Putin’s harshest critics. He told Echo of Moscow radio that he was unsure how to interpret the incident.

Speaking before Rybkin’s return, Berezovsky said he had talked with Rybkin, who said “he had gotten tired and gone to Kiev to visit his friends.”

“His voice sounded absolutely normal, as far as I am concerned,” Berezovsky said. “And I told him that spending some time with friends is cool, of course, but the problem is that the whole world has been up on its ears for several days looking for him.”

Berezovsky said he wanted to learn more before defining Rybkin’s behavior “as anything reckless or as something else.”

If it was “some reckless move,” he added, Rybkin’s political career “is finished.”

Albina Rybkina, the candidate’s wife, reached by telephone at home after her husband’s return to Moscow, said that “the trip was not a party at all.”

As for Rybkin’s mood, she said “so far, he’s not doing so good.”

Asked to explain, she said, “Probably because the ‘party’ didn’t turn out so great for him.”

Shevtsova said “there must have been some people who have known right from the very outset that Rybkin was fine.”

She added that because Putin faces no viable challenger among the six candidates running against him, the election was bound to turn into a farce. Putin has about 75% support in opinion polls, and his closest competitor in the race is at 3%.

“To cut a long story short, if the election has no substance, no agenda, no competition or rivalry, anything like that might happen in order to compensate for the lack of substance,” she said.

Alexei V. Kuznetsov and Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.