Dayton Daily News

3,000 arrested demanding release of opposition leader

- By Daria Litvinova and Jim Heintz

MOSCOW — Russian police arrested more than 3,000 people Saturday in nationwide protests demanding the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe, according to a group that counts political detentions.

The protests in scores of cities in temperatur­es as low as minus-58 highlighte­d how Navalny has built influence far beyond the political and cultural centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In Moscow, an estimated 15,000 demonstrat­ors gathered in and around Pushkin Square in the city center, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrat­ors were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Some were beaten with batons.

Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested.

Police eventually pushed demonstrat­ors out of the square. Thousands then regrouped along a wide boulevard about a half-mile away, many of them throwing snowballs at the police before dispersing.

Some later went to protest near the jail where Navalny is held. Police made an undetermin­ed number of arrests there.

The protests stretched across Russia’s vast territory, from the island city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk north of Japan and the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatur­es plunged to minus-50 Celsius, to Russia’s more populous European cities. Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have built an extensive network of support despite official government repression and being routinely ignored by state media.

“The situation is getting worse and worse, it’s total lawlessnes­s,” said Andrei Gorkyov, a protester in Moscow. “And if we stay silent, it will go on forever.”

The OVD-Info group, which monitors political arrests, said at least 1,167 people were detained in Moscow and more than 460 at another large demonstrat­ion in St. Petersburg.

Overall, it said 3,068 people had been arrested in some 90 cities, revising the count downward from its earlier report of 3,445. The group did not give an explanatio­n for its revision. Russian police did not provide arrest figures.

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