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Protests broke out in more than 60 Russian cities on Saturday, demanding the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent opponent, who was arrested upon his return to Russia after a medical trip to Germany.
Russian police arrested more than 2,000 protesters, some of whom took to the streets with freezing temperatures reaching minus 50 degrees. Russian authorities said the protests were illegal because they did not obtain the necessary licenses.
In Moscow, thousands of protesters gathered in Pushkin Square in the center of the city, where clashes broke out between protesters and police, and riot police took several protesters to police buses and detention trucks. Navalny’s wife, Yulia, was among those arrested. The protests escalated into violence between police with batons and snowballing protesters.
The protests spread across the vast lands of Russia, from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in northern Japan and Yakutsk in eastern Siberia, as temperatures dropped to minus 50 degrees Celsius, to Russia’s most populous European cities.
The scale of the protests showed how Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign had managed to build a broad network of support despite official government crackdown, and the protests were routinely ignored by state media.
The group “OVD Info”, which oversees political arrests, said that at least 795 people were arrested in Moscow on Saturday, and more than 300 protesters were arrested in another large demonstration in St. Petersburg. The total number of protesters, who were arrested until the afternoon in some 90 Russian cities, reached almost 2,131 people.
On Thursday, Moscow police arrested three of Navalny’s top aides, and two of them were later jailed for nine to ten days.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova from the US embassy in Moscow explained why she published maps of protesters’ movements in Russian cities on the eve of the demonstrations. In press releases, she asked if this step was an instruction given to the protesters by the embassy, data that even the organizers of the protests did not reveal, according to her.
Zakharova said that if the Russian embassy in Washington, for example, published maps of the movement of American protesters towards the Capitol building, this would have caused anti-Russian hysteria.
For their part, the United States, the European Union and Great Britain condemned what they described as an “organized campaign” to clamp down on freedom of expression in Russia. A spokeswoman for the US embassy in Moscow said: “The Russian authorities are arresting peaceful protesters and journalists. A coordinated campaign to suppress freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.” “This continues through years of Russia’s tightening of restrictions and repressive measures against civil society, independent media and the political opposition,” the spokeswoman added.
The British Foreign Office said the UK is “extremely concerned about the arrest of peaceful protesters”, and called on the “Russian government to respect its international obligations in the field of human rights”. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, condemned the “widespread arrests and disproportionate use of force” by the Russian authorities.
Navalny had returned to Russia a few days ago after a period of treatment in Germany, following a period of coma in which he entered on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20, 2020. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a hospital in Berlin two days later.
And laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests conducted by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have shown that he was exposed to poisoning with Novichok nerve gas, dating back to the Soviet era.
Russian authorities insisted that doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before taking him to Germany found no traces of the poison and demanded that German officials provide proof of his poisoning.
In December 2020, Navalny released a recorded phone call that he said he made with a man he described as part of a group of Federal Security Service officers, who were said to be responsible for his poisoning, and who tried to cover it up. . But Federal Security described the recording as false.
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