Thousands at Moscow protest
Tens of thousands of people rallied Saturday, local time, against the exclusion of some city council candidates from Moscow’s upcoming election, turning out for one of the Russian capital’s biggest political protests in years.
After the rally, which was officially sanctioned, hundreds of participants streamed to an area near the presidential administration building to continue with an unauthorised demonstration. They were confronted by riot police and the arrest-monitoring group OVD-Info said 136 people were detained.
The rally was the fourth consecutive weekend demonstration in Moscow over the local election.
The determined opposition has prompted protests in other cities, reflecting widespread frustration with Russia’s tightly controlled politics.
The protest attracted some 50,000 people, said Beliy Schetchik, an organisation that counts public meeting attendance.
Police put turnout at 20,000. OVD-Info also said 86 people were arrested Saturday in St Petersburg at an unsanctioned demonstration in support of the Moscow protests.
Unlike the previous two Moscow rallies, where police harshly dispersed the crowds and detained thousands of demonstrators, Saturday’s gathering in a neighbourhood with relatively few passers-by sanctioned.
It was held on a street flanked by high buildings and sandwiched between two busy thoroughfares.
Lyubov Sobol, one of the city council candidates denied a place on the ballot and a spearhead of the election protest, was among those detained in Moscow on Saturday.
A video on Sobol’s Twitter feed was officially showed officers breaking into her office as she demanded an explanation from them.
Small related protests also were reported in several Siberian cities on Saturday. A month of demonstrations over elections for the Moscow city legislature have turned into the biggest sustained protest movement in Russia since 2011-2013, when protesters took to the streets against perceived electoral fraud.
Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared ‘‘down with the tsar!’’ and waved Russian flags. They are demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month after they were not allowed onto the ballot.
‘‘The authorities have become brazen. It’s time to defend our rights,’’ said Natalya Plokhova, a recruiting consultant.
As the scenes unfolded in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin was shown on state television in a leather jacket at a biker show organised by the Night Wolves motorcycle club on the peninsula of Crimea which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Putin and the Kremlin have so far avoided commenting on the unrest over the Moscow city elections. –
Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared ‘‘down with the tsar!’’ . . . They are demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month.