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Yesterday there were protests throughout Russia against the authoritarian government of Vladimir Putin and the arrest of dissident Alexei Navalny, which took place last Sunday on his return from Germany where in recent months he had been treated for a poisoning ordered according to him – and according to many reconstructions – by the Russian security services. Although the demonstrations were not authorized by the government, the turnout was much higher than expected: protests were recorded in at least 109 cities in Russia. Law enforcement agencies have forcibly suppressed protests almost everywhere: according to the site OVD information, which monitors arrests during opposition rallies, 3,324 protesters were arrested at the end of the day.
In Moscow, according to the police, some 4,000 people participated in the protests. A calculation of Reuters he estimated that they were at least ten times more. “The crowd stretched for miles in all directions from the central Pushkin square,” wrote the Financial times, “Flooding Sidewalks and Blocking Traffic.” Also in Moscow there were the most violent clashes with the police, who at one point were even attacked with snowballs.
At the end of the day, the police arrested 1,320 protesters, including Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who was released a few hours later. Those arrested run the risk of being sentenced to several years in prison, since in Russia there are very high penalties for those who attack the police, even in self-defense. “Hitting a police officer is a crime,” state television menacingly recalled during the protests: “hundreds of videos were shot containing the faces of the protesters.”
According to guardian There have not been such widespread and extensive protests since 2012, when there was fraud and irregularities during the presidential elections won by Vladimir Putin. Journalists covering Russia noted that the protests also took place in small, remote Siberian towns, and even on the island of Sakhalin, a few kilometers from Japan, where hundreds of people gathered outside the local government office shouting chorus “Putin is a thief.” Dozens of people protested in Yakutsk, central Russia, despite the temperature reaching -50 ° C yesterday.
This pro-Navalny protest in Yakutsk in negative 50C absolutely blows my mind pic.twitter.com/1vnTqxUvtT
– Bakhti Nishanov (@b_nishanov) January 23, 2021
Officially, neither the government nor Putin commented on the protests. The only press release released yesterday celebrated the career of Larry King, the historic host of the CNN He died at 87. Navalny collaborators, for their part, thanked the protesters several times: “If Putin believes that the worst is over, he is naive and is very wrong,” said Leonid Volkov, one of the people closest to Navalny, in a video posted on YouTube. .
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