Occupy Moscow threat by protesters over Vladimir Putin's 'rigged vote' in presidential election Police have drafted 6,500 reserves including special forces from Russia's regions, and up to 35,000 officers will be on duty in the capital in coming days. Bloggers posted photographs of columns of police trucks trundling toward the capital on Saturday. Ilya Ponomarev, an opposition leader and MP, said security sources informed him that 800 Chechen troops had been brought to the capital as a reserve to help crush protests if necessary. Nashi has said it will put several thousand members on Moscow's streets to prevent "illegal attempts by the opposition to destabilise the situation and put in doubt the presidential election results." Alexei Navalny, the popular anti-corruption blogger who is not running for the presidency, spoke in favour of stepping up civil disobedience earlier this week. "I support an escalation of the conflict," he said in a television interview. By that I mean a build-up of protest. One fine day we must come on to the streets and not go away. He backed plans to set up a tent camp, saying: "People sit in tents drinking tea, what's not peaceful about that?" Putin's circle has cleared the ground for a harsh response to any dissent resembling the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine when hundreds of demonstrators camped near Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). A senior Kremlin source told Kommersant newspaper: "If there any attempts to move to longer-lasting protests like the Ukrainian maidan then tough measures will be taken." After long talks, protest coordinators including the leftist radical Sergei Udaltsov agreed with Moscow city authorities on Thursday that Monday's opposition protest would be held on Pushkin Square at 7pm, rather than Manezh Square next to the Kremlin which they had originally requested. That decision provoked a sharp reaction from part of the protest movement. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one anti-Putin activist said: "There was no need to compromise. It's absurd to ask permission to protest. We should raise Navalny on our shoulders and march on the Kremlin. Mr Navalny said on Twitter on Friday that after Monday's rally at Pushkin Square "everybody who would like to can peacefully and without hurry begin to move towards Manezh Square." That is a challenging statement because under Russian law any person attending an unsanctioned protest or straying from an agreed location is committing an offence punishable with a short prison sentence. Mr Navalny and several other activists were jailed for 15 days in December after attending a protest over Putin's supporters allegedly falsifying the results of parliamentary elections that month in favour of the prime minister's party, United Russia. Three subsequent protests overt the election result drew tens of thousands of people, making them the largest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Putin has taken a firm stance against the protesters and claimed last week that they were planning "provocations." "They are ready even to sacrifice someone themselves and then blame the authorities," he said. They'll stuff the ballots... and then complain about it. However, election monitors expect the ruling authorities to be the chief culprit in any fraud and tens of thousands of civil observers will be providing immense scrutiny of the vote. Each one is signed up with one of the five candidates - Vladimir Putin; the communist, Gennady Zyuganov; metals tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov; veteran ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and former Putin ally, Sergei Mironov. The four weak candidates facing Putin are all thought to have received some form of approval from him, and Mr Prokhorov, the billionaire tycoon, is frequently called a "Kremlin project" to split the liberal electorate.