Russian police arrested more than 1,000 people in Moscow on Saturday in one of the biggest crackdowns of recent times against an increasingly defiant opposition decrying President Vladimir Putin's tight grip on power.
The detentions came before and after a protest to demand that opposition members be allowed to run in a local election. Authorities had declared it illegal and sought to block participation, but several thousand people turned up anyway in one of the longest and most determined protests of recent years.
Chants of "Russia without Putin" and "Putin resign" echoed through central Moscow as guards clad in riot gear beat back protesters with batons and roughly detained people.
At least one woman and a man appeared to have suffered serious head wounds.
Though the authorities have the resources to break up demonstrations, Saturday's events showed how many activists and especially younger people are intent on pressing to open Russia's tightly choreographed political system to competition.
Jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny had called for Saturday's protest to persuade officials to allow opposition-minded candidates to run in a Sept. 8 vote.
Authorities say they were barred because they failed to collect sufficient genuine signatures in their support.
Opinion polls have shown support for Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, only in the single digits. But backers note he won almost one-third of the vote in a 2013 Moscow mayoral race and say his movement could build momentum in the Russian capital if allowed to compete fairly.
Though Putin's approval rating is still high at well over 60 per cent, it is lower than it used to be due to discontent over years of falling incomes. Last year, the 66-year-old former KGB intelligence officer won a landslide re-election and a new six-year term until 2024.
Burnishing his man of action image, Putin spent Saturday diving to the bottom of the Gulf of Finland in a mini-submarine to pay tribute to a Soviet submarine that sank there during the Second World War.
OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group, said police detained at least 1,067 people before or at Saturday's protest. As in past sweeps, many were only held for a matter of hours.
Police put participation at more than 3,500 people, of whom it said around 700 were journalists and bloggers.
Some activists were arrested twice after being released and then returning to protest in a different place. Reuters witnesses said some of those detained appeared to be ordinary passersby in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One of those detained, Alexander Latyshev, 45, said he had came from the nearby Vladimir region to discuss business with an associate and been randomly detained. "I was just sitting on a bench (when they took me)," he told Reuters inside a police bus.
Under Russian law, the location and timing of such protests needs to be agreed with authorities beforehand, something that was not done for Saturday's event. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/The Associated Press)
Before the protest, police detained activists to prevent them from attending the protest and blocked off some streets.
During the demonstration, they raided an office being used by Navalny's supporters to live stream the protest.
TV Rain, an independent station covering the protests, said its editor-in-chief had been called in for questioning.
Under Russian law, the location and timing of such protests needs to be agreed with authorities beforehand, something that was not done for Saturday's event.
Navalny was jailed for 30 days on Wednesday and other members of the opposition have had their homes searched. Ilya Yashin, a Navalny ally, said on Facebook on Saturday that police had searched his Moscow flat overnight before detaining him and driving him out of the Russian capital.
He called for another protest next Saturday.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny's spokesperson, said on Twitter she and another activist had been detained on Saturday morning. Other prominent activists, Dmitry Gudkov and Lyubov Sobol, were detained later. Sobol was arrested a second time later on Saturday after being released.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, a Putin ally, had warned that authorities would act decisively against the risk of "serious provocations."
Russia's Investigative Committee, the police investigative arm, has already opened a criminal investigation into an opposition rally in June which it said may have obstructed the work of Moscow's electoral commission.
An authorized protest in Moscow last weekend, also calling for the disbarred candidates to be registered, was attended by more than 20,000 people, according to the White Counter monitoring group.
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.
Also, the leader of the opposition who called for the protests, and is currently serving a jail sentence for violating protest laws, was rushed from jail to the hospital due to a possible poisoning on the same day:
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was hospitalized on Sunday after suffering an acute allergic reaction which one doctor said may have been the result of him being poisoned with an unknown chemical substance.
Navalny, 43, was rushed to hospital on Sunday morning from jail where he is serving a 30-day sentence for violating tough protest laws, a day after police in Moscow detained over 1,000 people for an illegal demonstration which Navalny called for.
His spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said Navalny had signs of an acute allergy with “severe swelling of the face and skin redness.”
Doctors at the hospital treating him have yet to publicly disclose their diagnosis and the precise cause of his symptoms remains unknown.
But one doctor who has treated him in the past and was able to briefly speak to him and look at him through the crack of a door on Sunday said she could not rule out that he had been poisoned.
“We cannot rule out that toxic damage to the skin and mucous membranes by an unknown chemical substance was inflicted with the help of a ‘third party’,” Anastasia Vasilyeva, the doctor, wrote on Facebook.
Vasilyeva, who said Navalny had a rash on his upper body, skin lesions, and discharge from his eye, called for samples of Navalny‘s bed sheets, skin and hair to be tested for chemicals.
She said she found the fact that she had not been allowed to examine him properly suspicious.
The Moscow hospital where Navalny‘s spokeswoman said he was being treated could not be reached for comment.
Separately, Navalny‘s lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, wrote on Facebook on Sunday evening that doctors did not know what was wrong with her client, but that she deemed his symptoms strange given that he had never suffered from allergies in the past.
Navalny suffered a serious chemical burn to his right eye in 2017 as a result of an assault. Doctors were able to restore his sight and save the eye.
He was jailed on Wednesday this week for 30 days for calling for Saturday’s unauthorized march to protest against the exclusion of several opposition candidates from a local election later this year.
While Navalny was behind bars, police rounded up more than 1,000 people in the Russian capital at the rally on Saturday in one of the biggest crackdowns in recent years against the opposition, drawing international criticism.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Andrea Kalan, wrote on Twitter on Sunday that the large number of detentions in Moscow and the “use of disproportionate police force undermine rights of citizens to participate in the democratic process.”
In a separate incident on Sunday, Russian activist Dmitry Gudkov, who was among the opposition candidates barred from running in local elections later this year, said he had been detained and taken to a Moscow police station.
The reason for Gudkov’s detention was not immediately clear, his spokesman Alexei Obukhov told Reuters.
Russia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Navalny and Gudkov’s detention.
Police on Sunday night detained about 10 people, including journalists, who had gathered in front of the hospital where Navalny was being treated.
Navalny, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist, has served several stints in jail in recent years for organizing anti-government demonstrations.
The European Court of Human Rights last year ruled Russia’s arrests and detention of Navalny in 2012 and 2014 were politically motivated and breached his human rights, a ruling Moscow called questionable.
Russian police arrested journalists gathered outside the hospital where he was being treated.
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.
