Thousands demand Navalny’s release
MOSCOW: Protests erupted in cities across Russia on Saturday to demand the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe. Police arrested more than 1,600 people, some of whom took to the streets in temperatures as frigid as -50°C.
In Moscow, thousands of demonstrators filled Pushkin Square in the city centre, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks, some beaten with batons.
Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested. Police eventually pushed demonstrators out of the square. Thousands then regrouped along a wide boulevard about a kilometre away, many of them throwing snowballs at the police.
The protests stretched across Russia’s vast territory, from the island city of Yuzhno-sakhalinsk north of Japan and the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to -50°C, to Russia’s more populous European cities. The range demonstrated how Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have built an extensive network of support despite official government repression and being routinely ignored by state media.
The OVD-INFO group that monitors political arrests said more than 500 people were detained in Moscow on Saturday and more than 200 at another large demonstration in St. Petersburg. Overall, it said 1,614 people had been arrested in some 90 cities.
Navalny was arrested on Jan.17 when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a severe nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin and which Russian authorities deny. Authorities say his stay in Germany violated terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 criminal conviction, while Navalny says the conviction was for made-up charges.
The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin’s government.
His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by leting him go free.
Navalny faces a court hearing in early February to determine whether his sentence in the criminal case for fraud and money-laundering — which Navalny says was politically motivated — is converted to 3 1/2 years behind bars.