Russian opposition leader hospitalized
MOSCOW — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, currently serving time in jail for calling for unauthorized protests, was hospitalized after suffering an acute allergic reaction on Sunday, his spokeswoman said.
Navalny was jailed this week for 30 days for calling for an unauthorized march to protest against the exclusion of several opposition candidates from a local election later this year.
Authorities say the opposition candidates were barred because they failed to collect enough genuine signatures backing them, an allegation they reject as false.
Police rounded up more than 1,000 people in the Russian capital at the march on Saturday in one of the biggest crackdowns in recent years against the opposition.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokeswoman, wrote on Twitter that he had been hospitalized on Sunday morning with “severe swelling of the face and skin redness.”
She said the cause of Navalny’s allergic reaction was unknown and that he had never had suffered from such reactions in the past.
The Moscow hospital where Navalny’s spokeswoman said he was being treated could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a separate incident on Sunday, Russian activist Dmitry Gudkov, who was among the opposition candidates barred from running in local elections this year, said he was detained and taken to a Moscow police station.
The reason for Gudkov’s detention was not immediately clear, his spokesman Alexei Obukhov told Reuters.
Russia’s interior ministry did not respond to a request for comment on Navalny and Gudkov’s detention.
Obukhov said Gudkov, a former MP who challenged pro-Kremlin initiatives, had been detained as he walked out of a shop near his home on Sunday, where he had been buying food for the protesters still being held.
Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, has served several stints in jail in recent years for organizing anti-government demonstrations.
The European Court of Human Rights last year ruled that Russia’s arrests and detention of Navalny in 2012 and 2014 were politically-motivated and breached his human rights, a ruling Moscow called questionable.
ARRESTED ‘SITTING ON A BENCH’
OVD-Info, an independent monitoring group, said police detained at least 1,373 people before or at Saturday’s protest. As in past sweeps, many were only held for a matter of hours.
Police put participation at more than 3,500 people, of whom it said around 700 people were journalists and bloggers. Activists said the number attending was likely to have been much higher.
Some activists were arrested twice after being released and then returning to protest in a different place. Reuters witnesses said some of those detained appeared to be ordinary passersby in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One of those detained, Alexander Latyshev, 45, said he had came from the nearby Vladimir region to discuss business with an associate and been randomly detained. “I was just sitting on a bench (when they took me),” he told Reuters inside a police bus.
Police also raided an office being used by Navalny’s supporters to live-stream the protest.
TV Rain, an independent station covering the protests, said its editor-in-chief had been called in for questioning after police visited its offices.
Under Russian law, the location and timing of such protests needs to be agreed with authorities beforehand, something that was not done for Saturday’s event.