Navalny arrest stirs nationwide wave of protests

MOSCOW — From the frozen streets of Russia’s Far East to the grand plazas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, tens of thousands of Russians rallied in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Saturday in the biggest nationwide showdown in years between the Kremlin and its opponents.

The protests largely drew young Russians and did not immediately pose a dire threat to President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. But their broad scope signaled widespread fatigue with the stagnant, corruptionplagued political order that Putin has presided over for two decades.

The protests began to unfold in the eastern regions of Russia, a country of 11 time zones, and moved like a wave across the sprawling nation, despite a heavy police presence and a drumbeat of menacing warnings on state media to stay away.

OVDInfo, an activist group that monitors political arrests, reported that 3,068 people had been arrested in some 90 cities. Among those taken into custody in Moscow — and later released — was Navalny’s wife, Yulia, who posted a photo of herself in a police wagon on Instagram.

The protests came six days after Navalny, an anticorruption activist, was himself arrested upon arrival in Moscow on a flight from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from poisoning by a militarygrade nerve agent. Western officials and Navalny have described the poisoning, which took place in Siberia in August, as an assassination attempt by the Russian state. The Kremlin denies the accusation.

Navalny, who now faces a yearslong prison term, called on his supporters across the country to take to the streets on Saturday. They numbered some 40,000 in Moscow, according to a Reuters estimate. The demonstrators there blocked traffic on central roadways and at one point pelted the police with snowballs. Thousands more marched down St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, and gathered in the central squares of numerous Siberian cities.

As the crowd in Moscow swelled in size in the afternoon, the situation grew increasingly tense in Pushkin Square, the focal point of the protest in the capital. Police officers rushed into groups of protesters, swinging batons.

By 9 p.m. in Moscow, the protests had largely died down. But Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Navalny, said supporters would organize more protests next weekend.

Pavel Golovkin / Associated Press Protesters confront police in Moscow during a demonstration demanding the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. More than 3,000 were arrested at rallies spanning Russia.