Throughout, he maintained a Russian connection, working with "Nashi", the Kremlin's youth movement, and creating a self-styled "election-monitoring group" that declared Moscow's 2014 illegal referendums in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk "free and fair".

Drokova became a spokesperson for Nashi, a youth group that physically harassed Putin opponents.

But he has stood by multiple previous high-level Putin supporters, including Robert Schlegel, who spoke for Nashi when it claimed credit for cyberattacks on Estonia, then served in the Russian parliament in Putin’s United Russia Party.

The party, Nashi, was banned after Russian forces swept into Ukraine.

The protests Thursday, at the Zhangjiang Nashi International apartment complex in Shanghai’s Pudong district, broke out after the developer notified 39 households that they would have to relocate because officials would turn nine buildings into isolation facilities, the developer said in a statement.