Russian police detained about 150 people during a rally of independent and opposition politicians in Moscow on Saturday, accusing them of links to an “undesirable organization”, a monitoring group and a TV station 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 forum, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, was a gathering of municipal delegates from across the country, Andrei Pivovarov, the organizer and executive director of Open Russia, a British group founded by the former oil tycoon and the Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. , said 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.
OVD-Info, which monitors the detention of political protesters and activists, has published a list of more than 150 people detained, according to them.
‘The police came to the forum of municipal delegates in Moscow. There are 150 people from all over the country. Everyone is detained. I mean everyone, ”opposition politician Ilya Yashin wrote on Twitter.
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.
According to police, all participants are being held due to the “activities of an unwanted organization”.
Open Russia is one of more than thirty groups that Moscow has declared undesirable and banned under a law passed in 2015.
Lawyers say the laws on “unwanted” organizations and “foreign agents” can be used to put pressure on members of civil society. Russia denies this, saying the laws are necessary to interfere with national security from the outside.