By Alexander Marrow
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police arrested some 200 people, including several prominent opposition figures, at a meeting of independent and opposition politicians in Moscow on Saturday, the Interior Ministry said.
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 Moscow forum, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, was a meeting of city deputies from across the country, Andrei Pivovarov, the event organizer and executive director of Open Russia, a British group founded by exiled oil magnate and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, told the radio station Echo Moskvy.
When the forum started, the police entered the building and began to detain the participants and take them to the police vans waiting outside, showing video footage from TV Rain and Russian news agencies.
The Moscow branch of the Russian Interior Ministry said about 200 people had been detained and an investigation was underway.
Police said the detainees were not following appropriate anti-coronavirus health measures, although the images showed most of them wearing masks. They said that some of the forum’s participants had links to an “undesirable organization”.
“A significant part of the participants did not have personal protective equipment,” said the police. “Members of an organization whose activities are considered undesirable on Russian territory were among the participants.”
OVD-Info, which monitors the detention of protesters and political activists, estimates the number of detainees at more than 170.
“The end of the brief forum was very symbolic: deputies in vans and masked policemen twisting people’s arms,” a detainee, opposition politician Ilya Yashin, wrote on Facebook.
“But no one has promised us freedom on a silver platter. Russia will still be free.”
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.
TV Rain said Yevgeny Roizman, the former mayor of Yekaterinburg, and Moscow councilor Yulia Galyamina were also arrested.
Open Russia is one of more than 30 groups that Moscow has labeled as undesirable and banned by a law adopted in 2015.
(Ros Russell edition)