More than 230 people have been arrested in rallies across Russia in memory of dissident Alexei Navalny a day after authorities announced his death in prison, where he was serving a sentence of almost 30 years in prison for extremism and fraud. In total there are more than 340 detainees since the death of the opponent became known.
“More than 340 people have already been detained at spontaneous monuments to Alexei Navalni. 230 of them were detained today,” the NGO OVD-Info, specialized in monitoring arrests, published on its Telegram channel.
“We are doing everything possible to help the detainees. OVD-Info defense (lawyers) work in different regions,” the group added.
The rallies have occurred in cities ranging from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Tomsk, Tula, Belgorod, Kursk, Novocherkask and Kranoyarsk to Ufa, Kirov, Velikiy and Novgorod, among others.
In Saint Petersburg, security forces have dispersed dozens of people who have gone to the Solovietsky Stone, a monument to the victims of political repression erected in Voskresenskaya. Among those detained in the aforementioned town are two journalists, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ photographer Alexei Dushutin and RusNews channel journalist Elina Kozich.
About 50 arrests were also made in the vicinity of Moscow’s Solovetsky Stone, on Lubyanka Square, in front of the KGB headquarters. The inhabitants of the capital have placed flowers at the monument. According to information from the newspaper ‘The Moscow Times’, RusNews journalist Yulia Petrova has been arrested in the area. “Right now harsh arrests are taking place in Moscow,” OVD-Info reported.
Media outlets such as Sota and RusNews have published videos of the protests, in which attendees carried signs with words like “Murderer” and chanted the word “Shame!” when the arrests began next to a Wailing Wall improvisedly raised in memory of Navalni.
The OVD-Info group has highlighted that the bishop of the Apostolic Orthodox Church Grigori Mijnov-Vaitenko, who is scheduled to hold a funeral service for Navalny, has been taken to the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior in the Petrogradsky district of Saint Petersburg.
The NGO has indicated that, in addition, concentrations have been recorded abroad. More than a thousand people have demonstrated in cities such as Yerevan, in Armenia, Tbilisi and Batumi, both in Georgia, as well as in the Turkish city of Istanbul and the capitals of Serbia, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Lithuania and Latvia, among others.