Russian police arrested about 150 people at a meeting of independent and opposition politicians in Moscow on Saturday, accusing them of links to an “undesirable organization”, said a monitoring group and a TV station.
The arrests came amid a crackdown on anti-Kremlin sentiment, following the arrest and imprisonment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who returned to Russia in January after recovering from nervous agent poisoning in Siberia.
The forum, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, was a meeting of city deputies from across the country, Andrei Pivovarov, event organizer and executive director of Open Russia, a British group founded by exiled oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said to the Echo Moskvy radio station.
When the forum started, the police entered the building and started arresting participants and taking them to the police vans waiting outside, showed a video from TV Rain and Russian news agencies.
OVD-Info, which monitors the detention of protesters and political activists, has published a list of more than 150 people it claims have been detained.
“The police came to the forum for city deputies in Moscow. There are 150 people from all over the country. Everyone is being detained. I mean, everyone, ”wrote opposition politician Ilya Yashin on Twitter.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit organization, shared a photo from inside a police van after being arrested.
The police said that all participants were being detained because of “the activities of an undesirable organization,” reported TV Rain.
Open Russia is one of more than 30 groups that Moscow has labeled as undesirable and banned by a law adopted in 2015.
Human rights defenders say that laws about “undesirable” organizations and “foreign agents” can be used to pressure and target members of civil society. Russia denies and says the laws are necessary to protect its national security from outside intrusion.