400 detained in Russia for attending events in memory of Navalny

St Petersburg, February 18

More than 400 people have been detained at events across 32 Russian cities since the death of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable opponent, according to rights group OVD-Info, as Russians continued to gather and lay flowers. It has been the largest wave of arrests at political events in Russia since September 2022, when more than 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 prison service said.

OVD-Info, which reports on freedom of assembly in Russia, said 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. But there was no mention of the events on Russian state news agencies, which are under full Kremlin control.

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. A footage on Saturday in St Petersburg showed dozens gathering by a monument to the victims of repression. Protesters laid flowers and candles, while some sang hymns and others hugged each other, shedding tears.

OVD-Info also reported individual arrests in smaller cities across Russia, from the border city of Belgorod, where seven were killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on Thursday, to Vorkuta, an Arctic mining outpost once a centre of the Stalin-era gulag labour camps.

The online news outlet SOTA reported that in Luhansk, an Ukrainian territory now under Russian control, residents laid flowers in Navalny's honour at a monument commemorating the victims of the Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin. — Reuters 

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