Max Seddon in Moscow,
Riot police arrested 685 people in Moscow at a protest on Saturday as Russia’s opposition attempted to mobilise growing anger against president Vladimir Putin.
Dressed in motorcycle helmets and protective armour, hundreds of police flooded Moscow’s central Boulevard ring road to prevent protesters from occupying it.
They set up barricades, blocked off roads and detained 685 protesters, according to monitoring group OVD-Info.
The number is far higher than the 30 people the police claimed they had arrested out of the 350 people they said had come to protest.
The crackdown is a sign the Kremlin is no longer willing to tolerate dissent following months of rising anger against president Vladimir Putin, whose approval ratings are at their lowest level in over a decade.
In the past few weeks Moscow’s opposition has seized on the growing discontent to stage some of the largest protests in years.
Law enforcement officers detain a participant of a rally calling for opposition candidates to be registered for elections to Moscow City Duma, the capital’s regional parliament, in Moscow, Russia July 27, 2019. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov – RC1E711F01F0
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said earlier this week that the protesters were “trying to usurp power illegitimately” and claimed “anarchy, disturbances, and chaos” would “end in tragedy”. He added: “We don’t live in Zimbabwe!”
Though the stakes are ostensibly small — about two dozen opposition candidates are appealing to be allowed to run in city council elections — the events come after the Kremlin made a series of unusual concessions to protesters, including an abrupt U-turn over the falsified prosecution of investigative journalist Ivan Golunov in June.
Activists had called on protesters to assemble at any point along the boulevard, making it difficult to estimate how many attended.
The disparate rallying points prevented protesters forming a united front against police, who closed off most major public space along the route. Several local businesses were forced to shut up shop in advance of the rally.
Last week, police arrested nearly 1,400 people who gathered outside the Moscow mayor’s office – the largest total in the capital for a decade.
Nearly all the violence was committed by the police, who broke the leg of the designer of the Moscow metro’s logo as he jogged past the protest site hours before it began, then charged him with violating laws on public gatherings.
Russian officials, however, have said the crackdown was justified because protesters did not have a permit, “used violence” against the police, and blocked traffic.
Investigators said they had collected evidence on “more than 10” suspects and would file charges that carry up to eight years in prison against “everyone who broke the law” at the protest. The most prominent opposition activists, including leader Alexei Navalny, were jailed for up to 30 days in advance of the protests.
On Saturday, investigators said they had opened criminal charges against Mr Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation – which has produced wildly popular videos accusing officials of amassing property and assets well beyond their modest means – of laundering Rbs1bn from unnamed “third parties.”