When Alexei Navalny landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, it did not take many minutes before police arrested him at passport control.
Despite the fact that, as if by chance, his plane was redirected to an airport other than the intended one, there were plenty of supporters and journalists on site.
The touching image of Navalny saying goodbye to Mrs Julia is now shown in the media around the world, while Navalny himself is locked up in a police station waiting for the authorities' next move.
But in the corridors of power, it probably gives rise to more toothpicks than tears, at least no tears of sympathy.
Crusade against corruption
Navalny's detractors are happy to use the opinion figures that show that in a presidential election he would only collect a single percent of the votes.
Which is true, although other surveys have indicated that those who have a positive image of Navalny or at least nothing negative to say of him are rather 20 percent.
Still a clear minority.
But voter support really plays very little role, because it is definitely not what Presidential candidate Navalny is making his mark.
It is above all through its crusade to pull the pants down on the corruption of power.
Slogans about liberal democracy and human rights rarely have a broad popular impact in Russia.
But the knowledge that you yourself knot on and are forced to turn over every ruble while the elite who shoehorn themselves into devouring caviar with a snow shovel, it feels.
And when state media, just like the Kremlin itself, do their best to silence Navalny, he has successfully used social media to get his message across.
Wrong focus on prison
It is also the message that power wants to silence.
Putin also wants to radiate integrity and dismiss Navalny as an irrelevant lackey to foreign interests.
If, on the other hand, you look at how the authorities act, you breathe desperation and bewilderment.
Ideally, you just want Navlanyj to shut up and fade away.
Threatening Navalny with imprisonment if he returns is, in fact, about keeping him away, not about locking him up in a Russian dungeon where he still only becomes a martyr.
Despite this, it is the risk of a long prison sentence that occupies a large part of the media's thoughts about Navalny's fate.
But locks and barriers are just a tool for squeezing unpleasant people.
Another weapon is the many ways in which Navalny and his organization are being pressured financially and legally.
Trying to crush the organization
During the past year, Navalny's bank accounts have been frozen and his apartment confiscated.
His anti-corruption organization has been branded as a "foreign agent", and then received such large fines for alleged embezzlement of donations that it was said that it had to close down and restart.
The oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known for the "magic factory" in St. Petersburg and the private soldiers in "Wagner", has bought up Navalny's debts for the express purpose of crushing him.
Navalny's employees have been arrested or charged with a crime.
Sitting in a Russian prison is really not a pleasure life.
But for Navalny as a symbol and as a nail in the coffin of power, the economic and legal cuts are probably at least as big a problem.
It is probably not in prison that the authorities can silence Navalny, but perhaps it will work at the bank.