Moscow: Police in Moscow said they arrested more than 1,000 people Saturday at a banned opposition protest calling for city authorities to reverse decisions to exclude key opposition candidates from the ballot paper.
The protest was the latest in a wave of demonstrations calling for fair local elections in the capital.
Around 3,500 people took to the streets for the unauthorised rally, according to official figures. Several of the arrests were violent and police used batons against protesters, AFP reporters at the scene saw.
In all, “1,074 people have been arrested for a variety of offences during an unauthorised demonstration in the centre of the capital”, Moscow police were quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.
The rally came a week after the capital’s biggest protest in years, when some 22,000 marchers called on officials to reverse rulings and allow opposition activists to stand for the city council in September.
Since then investigators have raided the homes and headquarters of several disqualified candidates, while top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was jailed for 30 days for calling the fresh protest.
“Honestly, I’m scared,” 42-year-old IT worker Alexei Sprizhitsky told AFP at the demonstration on Saturday.
He said the last time he had seen this level of pressure on activists was in 2012, when President Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister sparked popular dissent.
Other leading opposition figures and would-be candidates were arrested in the hours leading up to the Saturday’s protest, which comes amid declining living standards and a fall in Putin’s approval ratings.
Local polls are a rare opportunity for dissenting voices to participate in political life as anti-Kremlin parties have been squeezed out of parliament over Putin’s two decades in charge.
OVD Info, which monitors demonstrations, said 835 people had been arrested at the rally by 1735 GMT.
The organisation reported that arrested protesters had suffered various injuries, including a broken nose and head fractures.
Groups of protesters had tried to blockade several streets in central Moscow in the early evening, but large numbers of police were quickly deployed to the area and broke it up, AFP journalists said.
Security was tight in central Moscow and police shut down the area outside city hall where protesters were planning to gather, forcing participants out onto side streets.
“This is our city!”, “Shame!” and “We want free elections,” the crowd chanted as police blocked off the site.
AFP