MOSCOW — Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, was placed under house arrest on Friday and ordered not use the Internet or telephone for a period of two months, thus removing President Vladimir V. Putin’s fiercest critic from public life.
The sentence capped a week in which the Russian authorities showed that they are willing to disrupt demonstrations, detain large numbers of people and hand down tough sentences to curtail internal dissent since the Sochi Winter Olympics concluded last Sunday.
Judge Artur Karpov at the Basmany Court in Moscow ruled that Mr. Navalny had violated the terms of a travel ban from a pending criminal case over the defrauding of a local branch of the cosmetics producer Yves Rocher.
“It’s a travel ban,” Judge Karpov told Mr. Navalny in a packed courtroom. “It meant you couldn’t go where you were not given express permission.”
The fraud case is one of several criminal prosecutions brought against Mr. Navalny by Russian prosecutors that seem politically motivated and largely trumped-up to give the authorities ways to curtail his movements and communication and to muzzle his criticism of Mr. Putin.
Mr. Navalny was convicted last July in an embezzlement case widely viewed as groundless, and sentenced to five years in prison. He was led out of the courtroom in Kirov, a regional capital, in handcuffs, only to be freed the next day on appeal and allowed to run for mayor of Moscow. At the time, his candidacy seemed to suit the Kremlin’s political goals by helping to portray the election as a genuine and hard-fought victory by the incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin, an ally of Mr. Putin.
Prosecutors requested house arrest after Mr. Navalny was detained at a rally in support of seven political activists who were sentenced to up to four years in prison on Monday for their part in a 2012 anti-Putin rally that evolved into clashes between demonstrators and the police.
Prosecutors on Friday accused Mr. Navalny of disturbing public order and of traveling outside the city limits.
Mr. Navalny has called the charges against him politically motivated. He is already serving a five-year probationary sentence for embezzlement in another case.
“Their only goal is to stop my political activities,” Mr. Navalny said, standing in the court in boots without laces, which were removed because he is serving a seven-day jail sentence for resisting the police at the rally Monday. “They want to stop me from coordinating our anticorruption projects.”
Jocular and irreverent, he railed against prosecutors during the trial, calling the terms of his travel ban “absurd.”
He also demanded that the judge allow him to use electronic communications through which he runs popular blogs and a Twitter account, as well as his organization, the Fund for the Fight Against Corruption.
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