TODAY: Yavlinsky to be disqualified from presidential race, Kudrin offers to consolidate forces with him; Medvedev’s bill crumbling; Prokhorov profiled; Sobyanin officially in charge of demonstration requests; opposition plans second February march; Magnitsky lawyer forcibly removed from case; U.N. reps slam Russia’s arms to Syria.

Grigory Yavlinsky, the Yabloko Party’s presidential candidate, will be disqualified from running in the March elections: the Central Elections Committee is blaming invalid signatures on his nominating petition; Yavlinsky says the move is an attempt to block genuine competition.  United Russia is brainstorming on how to restore public trust in elections.  Independent election watchdog Golos may be forced to relocate just one month before the presidential vote due to raised rents and planned power shortages.  Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin suggested that he and Yavlinsky ‘consolidate democratic forces’ by working together.  Kudrin says that the plan to replace Medvedev with Vladimir Putin as President was not planned four years ago, saying that he ‘saw a certain interest on Medvedev’s part to remain as president’.  It looks unlikely the Dmitry Medvedev’s bid to push through one last reform (direct elections for governors) as President will succeed, prompting the Moscow Times to consider a ‘lame duck’ presidency of ‘crumbling’ plans for reform.  Nikolai Petrov analyses the wording of the bill, which he calls a ‘Trojan Horse’.  The Independent profiles ‘gangling billionaire’ Mikhail Prokhorov.  A BBC correspondent talks to Putin supporters in Novgorod: ‘In 1991 the shops here were empty […] Now we’ve got everything they have in the West […] and it’s thanks to Putin.’  Was Putin’s tract on nationalism ‘plagiarized from a sociological monograph’?