Vladimir Putin's return to be marked with lavish ceremony

Bells will ring, the air will fill with music and 5,000 bottles of champagne will be uncorked next week during a lavish ceremony due to mark Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin. Around 2,000 guests, including Putin's best foreign allies, Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder, are expected to attend the ceremony on Monday. Everything has been choreographed to the smallest detail. Putin will enter the Kremlin to the sounds of a military march by Tchaikovsky and exit to the boom of a 30-gun military salute. More military fare awaits as the presidential orchestra plays a "standard array" of military marches as the elite Presidential Regiment marches around Cathedral Square, a church-filled plaza inside the Kremlin walls. Guests will then retire to an extravagant Russian meal, with a menu believed to feature sturgeon in champagne sauce and mini-ratatouille. The Kremlin will pour 5,000 bottles of a collector's edition 2008 vintage sparkling wine by Abrau-Dyurso, a vineyard based in Krasnodar, in the south of Russia. Putin's critics have decried the event's estimated 26m rouble (£545,000) budget. They have also set their sights on the event's invitees, with Russia's opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, launching a Twitter campaign to pressure Arnold Schwarzenegger, film star and former governor of California, to cancel his reported plans to attend the event. "Your visit to Putin's inauguration will mean only one thing: @ChuckNorris is cooler than you," Navalny wrote, in one of dozens of tweets. One of his supporters wrote to Schwarzenegger: "Since you support petty dictators like Putin, I wish to inform you that I like you no more. Hasta la vista, baby." Thousands of Russians are due to gather on Sunday on the eve of Putin's inauguration to protest against his return to the presidency. It will be the first major protest since early March, when tens of thousands took to the streets to protest against electoral fraud and Putin's regime.