Russia: Police arrest over 3,000 protesters demanding Alexei Navalny's release

Russian police have arrested more than 3,000 people so far amid the protests, said the group that counts the political detentions. Nationwide demonstrations, demanding an immediate release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, were held. The protests were organised in a range of cities across Russia when the temperatures were as low as minus-50 C, highlighting the influence Kremlin’s most prominent foe has built in the nation. Navalny's wife Yulia was also detained in Moscow. 

As per the Associated Press reports, in Moscow itself, nearly 15,000 demonstrators gathered in and around the Pushkin Square in the city centre where the clashes between the demonstrators and the law enforcement broke out. Reportedly, the protesters were roughly dragged off by riot officers in Russia to police and detention trucks with some of them being beaten with batons. A protester in Moscow, Andrei Gorkyov noted that the “situation is getting worse and worse” before adding that it is “total lawlessness”. Gorkyov said, "And if we stay silent, it will go on forever".

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Protesters threw snowballs at police

Eventually, the protesters were pushed out of the square in the nation’s capital. However, before dispersing, they first regrouped along a wide boulevard nearby and many threw snowballs at the law enforcement. Some of them later went to the prison where the Russian opposition leader is held and police made an undetermined number of arrests there. Especially since his poisoning in August 2020, Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have drastically built an extensive network of support despite the reported repression of the government. 

The OVD-Infor group, that monitors the political arrests, said nearly 1,167 people were detained in Moscow, 460 at St. Petersburg. But overall, 3,068 people had been arrested across 90 cities. However, the group has not given any explanation for its revision and Russian police have also not provided any arrest figures. Navalny was arrested on January 17 on returning to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent nearly five months recovering from nerve-agent poisoning that he has blamed on the Kremlin but Russian authorities deny. 

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