MOSCOW (AP) – Moscow police arrested about 200 people who participated in a forum for independent members of city councils on Saturday, an action that took place amid a multi-faceted crackdown on dissidents by Russian authorities.
The police showed up at the meeting shortly after opening at a Moscow hotel, saying that everyone present would be detained for participating in an event organized by an “undesirable” organization. A police officer who led the operation said the detainees would be taken to police stations and charged with administrative violations.
Moscow police said in a statement that they acted to interrupt the meeting because it violated coronavirus restrictions, since many participants did not wear masks. They said that about 200 participants were arrested, some of them allegedly members of an unspecified “undesirable” organization.
OVD-Info, an independent group that monitors arrests and political repression, has published a list of more than 180 people detained. They included Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician who heads one of Moscow’s municipal districts; the former mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman; and Moscow city councilor Yulia Galyamina.
The police began to release detainees after handing them judicial subpoenas for participating in the activities of an “undesirable” organization, a crime liable to a fine. It was not clear how many remained in police custody on Saturday night.
“Their goal was to scare people away from engaging in politics,” said Andrei Pivovarov, a politician who helped organize the forum, in a video recorded while in a police van.
Pivovarov played a leading role in Open Russia, a group founded by self-exiled Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky moved to London after spending 10 years in prison in Russia on charges widely seen as political revenge for challenging President Vladimir Putin’s government.
A 2015 law introduced criminal punishment for participation in “undesirable” organizations. The government used the law to ban some 30 groups, including Open Russia.
An earlier law required non-governmental organizations that receive foreign funding and engage in activities loosely described as policies to register as “foreign agents”.
The laws were widely criticized as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to crack down on dissent, but Russian officials described them as an adequate response to the supposed Western efforts to undermine the country.
The police crackdown on Saturday’s forum follows the arrest and imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most determined political opponent was arrested on January 17 on his return from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nervous agent poisoning he attributes to the Kremlin. Russian authorities rejected the charge.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for violating the terms of his probation while convalescing in Germany – charges he considered a Kremlin revenge. His arrest and imprisonment sparked a wave of protests across Russia, to which the authorities responded with massive repression.
The government stepped up its crackdown on the opposition ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for September, as the popularity of the main Kremlin-backed party, United Russia, has waned.