Alexei Navalny’s wife among thousands arrested in anti-Putin protests across Russia
- Protesters said they wanted to see new faces in politics and that authorities were persecuting the Kremlin critic for speaking the truth
- Navalny returned to Russia last week after five months in Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning attack he says was ordered by Putin
Police detained more than 1,000 people across Russia on Saturday and broke up rallies around the country as tens of thousands of protesters demanded the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
The authorities had warned people to stay away from Saturday’s protests, saying they risked catching Covid-19 as well as prosecution and possible jail time for attending an unauthorised event.
But protesters defied the ban and bitter cold, and turned out in force.
In central Moscow, at least 40,000 people had gathered in one of the biggest unauthorised rallies for years, police were seen roughly detaining people, bundling them into nearby vans.
The authorities said just some 4,000 people had shown up.
Some protesters chanted “Putin is a thief”, and “Disgrace” and “Freedom to Navalny!”
Navalny’s wife Yulia said on social media she had been detained at the rally. His mother Ludmila was also at the protest.
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Some of Navalny’s political allies were detained in the days before the protest; others on the day itself.
The OVD-Info protest monitor group said that at least 1,614 people, including 300 in Moscow and 162 in St Petersburg, had been detained across Russia, a number likely to rise.
It reported arrests at rallies in nearly 70 towns and cities.
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One Moscow protester, Sergei Radchenko, 53, said: “I’m tired of being afraid. I haven’t just turned up for myself and Navalny, but for my son because there is no future in this country.”
He added that he was frightened but felt strongly about what he called an out of control judicial system.
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Russia on Saturday accused the US embassy in Moscow of publishing routes of planned demonstrations and demanded an explanation from American diplomats.
“Yesterday the US embassy in Moscow published ‘protest routes’ in Russian cities and tossed around information about a ‘march on the Kremlin,’” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook, adding: “US colleagues will have to explain themselves.”
Britain urged Russia to respect international human rights commitments following the detention of Navalny’s supporters.
“We urge the Russian government to respect and comply with its international commitments on human rights, and release citizens detained during peaceful demonstrations,” the British foreign ministry said in a statement.
Video footage from the Russian Far East showed riot police in Vladivostok chasing a group of protesters down the street, while demonstrators in Khabarovsk, braving temperatures of around -14 Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), chanted “Bandits!”
Police in Siberia’s Yakutsk, one of the coldest cities in the world, where the temperature was -52 Celsius on Saturday, grabbed a protester by his arms and legs and dragged him into a van, video footage showed.
Opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov said the scale of the protests in the regions was unusual.
“Everyone must be really fed up with the stealing and lies if the regions have risen up like this,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mobile phone and internet services suffered outages on Saturday, the monitoring site downdetector.ru showed, a tactic sometimes used by authorities to make it harder for protesters to communicate among themselves and share video footage online.
Navalny says Russian agent put poison in his underwear in murder plot
Navalny’s allies hope to tap into what polls say are pent-up frustrations among the public over years of falling wages and economic fallout from the pandemic.
But Putin’s grip on power looks unassailable for now and the 68-year-old president regularly records an approval rating of over 60 per cent, much higher than that of Navalny.
