MOSCOW (AP) – Russian police have issued a strong warning against participating in protests planned for Sunday to call for the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent enemy.
The warning comes amid arrests of Navalny associates and opposition journalists and a police plan to restrict movement in central Moscow on Sunday.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 after flying back from Germany to Russia, where he spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning. His arrest sparked protests across the country a week ago in about 100 cities; almost 4,000 people were arrested.
The next demonstration in Moscow is planned for Lubyanka Square. The Federal Security Service, which Navalny claims to arrange to poison him with a Soviet-era nerve agent on behalf of the Kremlin, is based in the square. The Russian government has denied participation in the poisoning of the 44-year-old man.
The city’s police department said that much of downtown Moscow, from Red Square to Lubyanka, will have pedestrian restrictions and that seven nearby metro stations will be closed on Sunday. Restaurants in the region are also expected to close, and the iconic GUM department store in Red Square said it would only open at night.
Russian Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk cited the coronavirus pandemic in a warning against protests on Saturday. She said participants who violate epidemiological regulations could face criminal charges.
The January 23 protests in support of Navalny were the largest and most common protests seen in Russia in many years, and authorities sought to prevent them from recurring. Police carried out a series of raids this week on apartments and offices of the Navalny family, associates and anti-corruption organization.
His brother Oleg, aide Lyubov Sobol and three others were put on two-month house arrest on Friday as part of a criminal investigation into alleged violations of coronavirus regulations during last weekend’s protests.
Sergei Smirnov, editor of the news website Mediazona, founded by members of the punk collective Pussy Riot, was arrested by the police on leaving his home on Saturday. No charges against him have been announced.
Navalny fell into a coma on August 20, during a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow. He was transferred to a Berlin hospital two days later. Laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to the nervous agent Novichok.
Russian authorities have refused to open a full criminal investigation, citing lack of evidence that he was poisoned.
Navalny was arrested when he returned to Russia on the grounds that his months of recovery in Germany violated the terms of a suspended sentence he received in a 2014 conviction for fraud and money laundering, a case he says was political revenge.
Shortly after the arrest, Navalny’s team released a two-hour video on their YouTube channel about a luxurious residence on the Black Sea allegedly built for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The property offers amenities such as an “aqua-disco”, a hookah lounge equipped to watch pole dance and a casino. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times and inspired a series of sarcastic jokes on the internet.
Putin said that neither he nor any of his close relatives own the property, and the Kremlin insisted that it has no relationship with the president, although it is protected by the federal bodyguard agency FSO, which provides security for senior government officials.
Later, Russian state television broadcast a report from the complex that showed it under construction and included an interview with an engineer who said the building would be a luxury hotel.
On Saturday, construction tycoon Arkady Rotenberg, a close associate of Putin and his occasional judo partner, said he owned the property.