Moscow ? The fate of Russia’s disappearing presidential candidate cleared up Tuesday when he turned up alive and seemingly well in Ukraine. But the mystery of what really happened to him only deepened.

Ivan Rybkin, a former parliamentary speaker mounting a long-shot challenge to President Vladimir Putin in the March 14 election, returned on an evening flight to Moscow, saying he had only gone to see friends in Kiev and was stunned to learn that people were looking for him.

Rybkin had been missing since Thursday night.

His explanation about his whereabouts left no one satisfied — not the police, who have spent the last several days searching for him; not his financial backer, who said it could spell the end of Rybkin’s political career; not his campaign manager, who fumed that she may quit over the episode; and certainly not his own wife, who proclaimed that any husband who would go off on a secret vacation without telling her was hardly fit to govern the country.

“I have the right to two or three days of private life,” Rybkin protested when he called Interfax news agency to report his whereabouts. “I came to Kiev with my friends, had fun, turned off mobile phones and didn’t watch television. I decided last week to take a break from all the bustle around me.” On landing later at an airport in Moscow, Rybkin suggested that he might drop out of the race because his family was so upset.

“Poor Russia if this kind of man is trying to run it,” his angry wife, Albina, told NTV television.

Critics smelled a publicity stunt.

“For the last several days, Rybkin is the most widely used name” in the news, Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of parliament and another presidential candidate, said in an interview a few hours before Rybkin re-emerged. “Even President Putin’s name is used not as often. We can think about whether that was done on purpose or not.”