By Alexander Marrow
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian police detained about 200 people, including several prominent opposition figures, during a meeting of independent and opposition politicians in Moscow on Saturday, Interior Ministry said.
The arrest comes amid a battle against anti-Kremlin sentiment, following the arrest and imprisonment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who returned to Russia in January after recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in Siberia.
The Moscow forum, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, was a gathering of municipal delegates from across the country, Andrei Pivovarov, the organizer and executive director of the Open Russia, a British group founded by the former oil. tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail. Khodorkovsky, told the radio station Echo Moskvy.
When the forum was underway, police entered the building and began detaining participants and took to police vans waiting outside, video footage from TV Rain and Russian news agencies showed.
The Moscow branch of the Russian Interior Ministry said about 200 people had been detained and that an investigation was underway.
Police said the detainees did not follow the appropriate health measures against the coronavirus, although most of them were wearing masks. They said that some of those who visit the forum have links to an ‘unwanted organization’.
A large portion of the participants did not have personal protective equipment, police said. “Members of an organization whose activities are considered undesirable in Russian territory were among the participants.”
OVD-Info, which monitors the detention of political protesters and activists, puts the number of detainees at more than 170.
“The final outcome of the short forum was very symbolic: delegates in police buses and masked police turning people’s arms,” one detainee, opposition politician Ilya Yashin, wrote on Facebook.
“But no one promised us freedom on a silver platter. Russia will still be free.”
Vladimir Kara-Murza, vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, a non-profit organization in Washington, shared a photo of the inside of a police van after he was detained.
TV Rain said Yevgeny Roizman, the former mayor of Yekaterinburg, and Moscow city councilor Yulia Galyamina were also detained.
Open Russia is one of more than thirty groups that Moscow has declared undesirable and banned under a law passed in 2015.
(Edited by Ros Russell)