[ad_1]
“Free Navalni” spread across Russia
Protests in more than 100 cities on the 31st
More than 4,000 citizens arrested
Reporter Yoon Yeo-jin [email protected]
Check-in: 2021-02-01 07:01:15Revision: 2021-02-01 07:08:57Published: 2021-02-01 07:10:23
Protesters demanding the release of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalni face police in Moscow on 31 (local time). Reuters Yonhap News
Protests demanding the release of Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalni took place across Russia on the 31st (local time). It is known that around 4,500 citizens were arrested in this protest.
According to local media such as Interfax News, protests in support of Navalni continued in more than 100 cities in Russia. Despite the Russian authorities rejecting all protests over the risk of Corona 19 spreading, thousands of people protested in Moscow from noon to 6 p.m. throughout the city, shouting slogans such as “ Free Navalni ” and Putin is a thief. Waged. Some protesters marched to the Matrosskaya Tishna detention center in northeast Moscow, where Navalni was imprisoned, and clashed with the police.
In St. Petersburg, thousands of people also protested in the city center. In addition, the Far Eastern cities of Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the Siberian cities, Novosibirks and Krasnoyarsk, the cities near the Ural Mountains, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Chelyabinsk and the western cities of Kaliningrad, have reached thousands of people. . Citizens of the month participated in the protests.
To prevent the protesters from gathering, the Moscow police concentrated troops at important points in the city, closed 10 metro stations and ordered restaurants and cafes to stop their activities. Protesters were forcibly arrested and detained by police and riot squads in most cities for refusing dissolution orders.
According to OVD-Info, a local non-governmental organization that oversees the detentions of political prisoners, more than 4,500 people have been detained across Russia. This is more than the group’s estimate of last week’s protest arrests (around 4,000). Some 1,450 people were reportedly arrested in the capital Moscow and about 1,000 people in the second city of Saint Petersburg. The group also reported that some protesters were brutally beaten with sticks during the arrest process.
In response, the United States urged Russia to release Navalni and condemned the crackdown on protesters. US Secretary of State Tony Blincoln tweeted: “The United States condemns the Russian authorities for the use of harsh repression tactics against peaceful protesters and reporters for the second week in a row.”
In a statement posted on Facebook, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned: “We demand that sovereign states stop interfering in internal affairs.”
Opposition activist Alexey Navalni attended a rally in support of opposition candidates in the Russian Duma city elections of Moscow in July 2019. This year he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. EPA Yonhap News
Navalni, one of Russia’s leading opposition activists, showed symptoms of poisoning on board while traveling from Tomsk, Siberia to Moscow on a Russian domestic flight in August last year. After returning to Korea on the 17th of last month, he was immediately arrested at the airport and imprisoned for 30 days and incarcerated in a detention center. Even during imprisonment, Navalni is unwilling to resist posting a video on YouTube revealing that a luxury resort was built on the Black Sea coast for Putin with donations from businessmen.
Reporter Yoon Yeo-jin [email protected] Some news from Yonhap
