Protesters back Navalny
Thousands take to streets chanting ‘Putin is a thief’
The Kremlin was served a warning yesterday as thousands of Russians poured on to the streets in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny ahead of a key court hearing that could lock him up for years.
In what could prove to be the biggest wave of nationwide protests in a decade, Russians rallied in more than 70 towns, from Siberia’s Yakutsk in – 51C conditions to St Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin’s home city, where thousands thronged Nevsky Prospect street, chanting ‘‘Putin is a thief’’.
The protests were sparked by the arrest of Navalny who had returned from Germany to Russia for the first time since he was poisoned in August.
Russia never launched a probe into the attack on the politician, while several independent European laboratories confirmed that he was poisoned by the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.
Rallies yesterday went ahead despite mounting pressure from the authorities and the police who arrested several key Navalny allies earlier this week and threatened protesters with rioting charges.
‘‘I have absolutely no fear because all they can do is to detain me – and so what? They can’t detain everyone,’’ Yulia, a schoolteacher who asked for her last name to be withheld, told The Sunday Telegraph at the rally on Moscow’s Pushinskaya Square.
Yesterday afternoon, crowds were too big for the square and spilt over into nearby streets.
Despite accusations that Navalny’s team was allegedly trying to recruit teenagers for the protest, most of the crowd was middle-aged and not necessarily supporters of the opposition leader.
‘‘It’s not about Navalny,’’ Lyudmila Beketova, 60, said. ‘‘When a person first gets poisoned and then he comes back home and gets arrested – even the most disabled grandma will come out in protest.’’ Riot police initially watched the rally from the sidelines but about an hour officers started to grab and arrest protesters at random, mostly targeting young men.
As the rally dragged on, groups of black-clad officers began to charge at peaceful demonstrators, beating them with batons and dragging them into police vans.
The Telegraph saw one -protester with his head bandaged, while footage from Moscow and other cities showed more people being brutally beaten.
Videos also circulated online showing protesters fighting back – some pelting police with snowballs – a rare sight in Russian protests, signalling the level of anger on the streets. Many in the crowds also stopped to chant ‘‘freedom’’, emboldened by the turnout.
Dozens of Navalny’s allies in the regions were arrested yesterday, and in Moscow, police detained his wife, Yulia, and key associate Lyubov Sobol who was taken away by the police as she was telling reporters on the snowcovered square about how happy she was to see so many people in the streets that day.
Police reported about 40 officers injured during the rally while the -activist group, OVDInfo, said nearly 2000 people were detained in Moscow.
Yesterday’s protests, which exceeded expectations, provided a major boost for 44-year-old Navalny ahead of his February 2 hearing when a court could send him to prison for three-and-a-half years for violating the terms of his suspended sentence.
‘‘The protest figures were very high despite a number of factors that played against it,’’ Vladimir Ashurkov, a close ally of Navalny, told The Telegraph.
The Kremlin issued repeated warnings for the politician not to come back to Russia, threatening him with charges that could lock him up for years.
The scale of yesterday’s protests puts the Kremlin in a tight spot if its plan is to crack down on the opposition further or jail Navalny for years, say critics.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at Carnegie Moscow Centre, tweeted yesterday: ‘‘The regime still has a huge resource for survival.’’