MOSCOW – Police detained more than 200 people in Russia’s Far East and Siberia on Saturday, while protesters defying the extreme cold and the ban on authorities were organizing demonstrations across the country to demand the release of the imprisoned Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny.
Navalny called on his supporters to protest after being arrested last weekend, when he returned from Germany to Moscow after being poisoned in August by a military-grade nervous agent.
Video footage of Vladivostok showed the riot police chasing a group of protesters on the street, while protesters in Khabarovsk, facing temperatures of around -14 Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), shouted “Shame!” and “Bandits!”
Police in the Siberian city of Yakutsk grabbed a demonstrator by the arms and legs and dragged him to a van, showed a video of the scene.
The monitoring group OVD-Info said 238 people, including 56 in Novosibirsk, have so far been detained at rallies across the country.
In Moscow, police erected barricades around Pushkinskaya Square while workers were working to rebuild it, an apparent attempt to prevent a demonstration that was scheduled to start at 11 am GMT.
The police also arrested some people gathered in the square before the demonstration, including a lone protester.
Navalny, a former lawyer who accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering his murder, could face years in prison for legal cases he calls forged. Putin denied involvement.
Navalny’s supporters hope to be able to produce a demonstration of support in the streets against the Kremlin, despite the winter conditions and the coronavirus pandemic, to pressure authorities to release it.
The West has told Moscow to let it go, creating new tensions in the already tense ties with Russia as US President Joe Biden starts his government.
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In an effort to garner support before the protests, Navalny’s team released a video about an opulent palace on the Black Sea that they claimed belonged to Putin, something the Kremlin denied. As of Saturday, the clip has been viewed more than 65 million times.
The authorities had banned protests in advance. The police were suppressed in the race for the rallies, arresting several of Navalny’s allies who they accused of calling for illegal protests and arresting at least two of them, including Navalny’s spokeswoman, for more than a week each.
Navalny’s allies hope to take advantage of what the polls say are public frustrations repressed over years of falling wages and the economic consequences of the pandemic. But Putin’s grip on power seems unassailable and the 68-year-old president regularly registers an approval rating of more than 60 percent, many times higher than Navalny’s.
The United States Embassy published the locations and times of the protests, telling Americans to stay away. Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called this “gross interference” in the country’s internal affairs.