Putin critic jailed as mass rallies energize Russian opposition
MOSCOW — Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was jailed for 15 days after the largest anti-government demonstrations for at least five years energized President Vladimir Putin’s critics as presidential elections loom.
Navalny was imprisoned by a Moscow court on Monday after being convicted of disobeying police and fined 20,000 rubles ($352) for organizing an unsanctioned protest after more than 1,000 people were detained in a wave of demonstrations in cities across Russia on Sunday. Despite draconian laws forbidding unsanctioned rallies, at least 60,000 took part in more than 80 protests, according to the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station.
“You can’t detain tens of thousands of people — yesterday we saw the authorities can only go so far,” Navalny told reporters in the court, where he appeared after being held overnight. “As long as people see tens of billions of dollars being stolen by top officials,” they’ll be ready to protest, he said.
The protests were the largest since demonstrations erupted in winter 2011 and spring 2012 against alleged vote-rigging in parliamentary elections and Putin’s return to the presidency for a third term. Putin, 64, is likely to seek a further six years as president in elections next March, though he hasn’t officially said he’ll run. Navalny, 40, has said he’ll be a candidate, but the Kremlin insists he’s ineligible because of a fraud conviction that the opposition activist has dismissed as politically motivated.
“This is just the start, and the culmination will be nearer to the presidential elections,” Vladimir Milov, one of the opposition leaders, said in a blog posting Monday. “Now our task is to force them into concessions.”
The protests were a “provocation” and police acted “absolutely correctly, professionally and legally” in dealing with them, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Monday. Organizers got people to join the demonstrations on the “lie” that they’d been approved by the authorities, he said.