Over 400 people have been detained at events across 32 Russian cities since the death of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable opponent.
This marks the largest wave of arrests at political events in Russia since Sept. 2022, when over 1,300 were arrested at demonstrations against a “partial mobilisation” of reservists for Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine.
Navalny, a 47-year-old former lawyer, fell unconscious and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony, where he was serving a three-decade sentence. The largest numbers of arrests occurred in St Petersburg and Moscow, where Navalny’s support had traditionally been strong.
As of 2000 GMT on Saturday, more than 200 people were detained in St. Petersburg.The death of Navalny robs the disparate Russian opposition of its most prominent leader as Putin prepares for the March presidential election, a rubber-stamp vote set to keep the former KGB spy in power until at least 2030.
Despite the arrests, hundreds of people across Russia continue to defy authorities to lay flowers at impromptu Navalny memorials.Footage filmed by Reuters on Saturday in St. Petersburg showed dozens gathering by a monument to the victims of repression, while protesters laid flowers and candles, sang hymns, and hugged each other, shedding tears.
OVD-Info reported individual arrests in smaller cities across Russia, from the border city of Belgorod to Vorkuta, an Arctic mining outpost once a center of the Stalin-era gulag labor camps.
(Reuters)
