MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police detained about 200 people, including several prominent opposition figures, at a meeting of independent politicians and the opposition in Moscow on Saturday, the Interior Ministry said.
The arrests come amid crackdown on anti-Kremlin sentiment, following the arrest and imprisonment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny who returned to Russia in January after recovering from agent poisoning. nervous in Siberia.
The Moscow forum, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, was a meeting of city councilors from across the country, Andrei Pivovarov, organizer of the event and executive director of Open Russia, a UK-based group founded by the former oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail. Khodorkovsky told radio station Echo Moskvy.
As the forum began, police entered the building and began arresting attendees and taking them to police vans waiting outside, video footage from TV Rain and Russian news agencies showed.
The Moscow branch of Russia’s interior ministry said about 200 people had been detained and an investigation was underway.
Police said the detainees were not following proper sanitary measures against the coronavirus, although images showed most were wearing masks. They said some of the forum attendees had links to an “undesirable organization.”
“A significant portion of the participants did not have personal protective equipment,” police said. “Members of an organization whose activities are considered undesirable on Russian territory were one of the participants.”
OVD-Info, which monitors the arrest of protesters and political activists, puts the number of detainees at more than 170.
“The end of the brief forum was very symbolic: MPs in police vans and masked police twisted people’s arms,” one of the detainees, opposition politician Ilya Yashin, wrote on Facebook.
“But no one promised us freedom on a silver plate. Russia will still be free. “
Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, shared an image from inside a police van after he was arrested.
TV Rain said Yevgeny Roizman, the former mayor of Ekaterinburg, and Moscow city councilor Yulia Galyamina were also arrested.
Open Russia is one of more than 30 groups that Moscow has labeled as undesirable and banned under a law passed in 2015.