Russian authorities stepped up the pressure on the country’s opposition yesterday by raiding the office of a protest leader and his team.

Alexei Navalny, the driving force behind major anti-government protests and President Vladimir Putin’s main opposition in recent years, live-streamed a video from his office as law enforcement officers cut through the front door with an electric saw yesterday morning.

A video released by Mr Navalny’s YouTube channel showed several masked men gather the foundation’s employees in a room with a Christmas tree and a disco ball and tell them: “Put your face to the wall. Stay where you are.”

The officers then disabled the CCTV cameras.

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The raid on Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in Moscow was one of several this year and came days after one of his allies was detained and sent off for military service at a remote Arctic base.

Both incidents appear to be the latest steps in an unusually vigorous crackdown on opposition movements by the Kremlin.

Mr Navalny, who made his name thanks to investigations into official corruption, said that yesterday’s raid was timed to disrupt his weekly YouTube show, which was to be streamed live in the evening.

“They clearly chose this day because I have a show tonight,” tweeted Mr Navalny, whose show last week garnered more than 1.4 million views on YouTube.

Police and investigators have raided Mr Navalny’s offices several times this year.

Each time, they would seize the team’s equipment including cameras used for streaming YouTube shows.

Mr Navalny’s foundation has asked supporters to donate money to buy new equipment to replace items the investigators seized and failed to return.

Leonid Volkov, one of Mr Navalny’s key allies, described the raid as a “robbery”.

Several hours later, he said the bank account the foundation uses for collecting donations had been blocked.

Mr Navalny and his associates joked about the raid, which came a few days before New Year’s Eve, Russia’s biggest annual holiday.

Nikolai Lyaskin, an employee of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, tweeted about the video of the sparks flying off the electric saw cutting through the office door with the caption: “New Year’s Eve fireworks.”

The raid was connected to a 2017 court ruling that ordered Mr Navalny to take down a viral YouTube video of his probe into the alleged secret wealth of Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister.

The 50-minute film, which triggered a wave of nationwide protests in spring 2017, has been watched more than 32 million times and is still available on Mr Navalny’s YouTube channel.

Earlier this week an ally of Mr Navalny was detained and sent off to serve at a top-secret military base in the Arctic. Ruslan Shaveddinov had been appealing against his military conscription.

The 23-year old disappeared on Monday after police broke into his flat and took him in for questioning.

The military later said he had been sent to serve on Novaya Zemlya, a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean which is home to a top-secret missile defence installation and was one of the Soviet Union’s main nuclear testing grounds during the Cold War.

An investigative journalist for a prominent opposition newspaper was also detained by Russian special forces yesterday.

‘Novaya Gazeta’ said investigators called on the home of Yulia Polukhina, its special correspondent, at 6am, and searched it for about four hours before taking Ms Polukhina for questioning.

The mother of two had no access to a lawyer and was released in the late afternoon, the paper said.

Investigators later said that Ms Polukhina, who has covered criminal activities in separatist-held eastern Ukraine, was questioned about a criminal gang from that area.

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