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24-01-2021
MOSCOW: Russian police have arrested more than 3,000 people and used force to break up rallies around the country, a monitoring group said, as tens of thousands of protesters demanded the release of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, whose wife was among those detained.
Navalny had called on his supporters to protest on Saturday after being arrested last weekend as he returned to Russia from Germany for the first time since being poisoned with a nerve agent he says was applied to his underpants by state security agents in August.
The authorities had warned people to stay away from the protests, saying they risked catching COVID-19 as well as prosecution and possible jail time for attending an unauthorized event. But protesters defied the ban and bitter cold and turned out in force.
The OVD-Info protest monitor group said at least 3,060 people including 1,099 in the capital, Moscow and 386 in Saint Petersburg had been detained across Russia, a number likely to rise. It reported arrests at rallies in nearly 
110 towns and cities.
In central Moscow, where estimated tens of thousands of people had gathered in one of the biggest unauthorized rallies for years, police were seen detaining people, bundling them into nearby vans. The authorities said just some 4,000 people had shown up.
“There were violent clashes with the police, with the police using their batons to beat them down,” local media, reporting from Moscow.
Navalny’s wife, Yulia, said on social media she had been detained at the rally. She was later released. Lyubov Sobol, a prominent aide of Navalny and lawyer, was also among those held.
Video footage from Vladivostok showed riot police chasing a group of protesters down the street, while demonstrators in Khabarovsk, braving 
temperatures of about -14C (7F), chanted “Shame!” and “Bandits!”
Police in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, one of the coldest cities in the world and where the temperature was -52C (-61.6 Fahrenheit) on Saturday, grabbed a protester by his arms and legs and dragged him into a van, video footage from the scene showed.
The Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said in a statement it had launched several preliminary probes into violence against law enforcement.
The United States and Belgium condemned the arrests and other tactics used against demonstrators, with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell saying the bloc would discuss “next steps” on Monday.
Britain’s foreign ministry said it was “deeply concerned by the detention of peaceful protesters”.
‘People coming out’
Navalny, 44, is in a Moscow prison pending the outcome of four legal matters he describes as trumped up. He could face years in jail. Authorities accused him of violating the terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 conviction for financial misdeeds, including when he was convalescing in Germany but Navalny accuses President Vladimir Putin of ordering his attempted murder. Putin has dismissed that, alleging the 44-year-old is part of a United States-backed dirty tricks campaign to discredit him.
Following Navalny’s arrest, his team released an investigation into a lavish Black Sea property allegedly owned by Putin, a claim the Kremlin denied.
The two-hour video report has been viewed more than 64 million times since its release on Tuesday, becoming the Kremlin critic’s most-watched YouTube investigation.
Navalny’s arrest drew widespread Western condemnation, with the US, the European Union, France and Canada all calling for his release.
On Saturday, Russia’s foreign ministry accused the US embassy in Moscow of publishing routes of planned demonstrations in support of Navalny and demanded an explanation from US diplomats.
“Yesterday the US embassy in Moscow published ‘protest routes’ in Russian cities and tossed around information about a ‘march on the Kremlin,’” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook. “US colleagues will have to explain themselves,” she added.
The US embassy in Moscow said it was following the rallies, adding that Washington supported “the right of all people to peaceful protest, freedom of expression”.
“Steps being taken by Russian authorities are suppressing those rights,” embassy spokeswoman Rebecca Ross said on Twitter.
Speaking to media, Anna Matveeva, a researcher at King’s College London, underlined the importance of the wide geographic reach of Saturday’s protests.
“The police (are) brutal; there is nothing new about it,” Matveeva told media “but the fact that the geography of protests has spread all the way from Moscow to western Russia and also in northern states … we are seeing a consistent number of people coming out, knowing that they might be beaten, that they might be detained, that they will have criminal records, and notwithstanding that, people are [still] coming out”. (Int’l News Desk)
