Russian police detain dozens of opposition deputies at forum

Police raid on an opposition conference in Moscow dedicated to running for municipal office.

Moscow deputy Yulia Galyamina was among the scores of Russian opposition figures arrested. Picture: AFP

Russian police on Saturday arrested about 200 opposition politicians and municipal deputies at a Moscow conference as authorities tighten the screws on Kremlin critics ahead of parliamentary elections.

A police raid on an opposition conference dedicated to running for municipal office came after President Vladimir Putin’s top critic, Alexei Navalny, was jailed for 2½ half years last month and more than 10,000 protesters were detained nationwide.

While police routinely break up opposition protests, the mass arrests of municipal deputies at a conference in Moscow were unprecedented.

Participants from more than 50 of Russia’s regions had gathered to discuss parliamentary and local elections in September at a forum organised by a project backed by prominent Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Forty minutes into the conference, police broke up the event and detained participants.

“The ENTIRE forum of Russian municipal deputies has been detained in Moscow!” Mr Khodorkovsky said on Twitter, calling the detentions “unconstitutional”.

As news of the detentions emerged, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an end to “persecution of independent voices”, noting the Kremlin had detained these people “on dubious grounds”.

A number of well-known opposition figures including Ilya Yashin, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Yulia Galyamina, Yevgeny Roizman and Andrei Pivovarov as well as journalists have been detained. “A very symbolic end to a short forum: deputies in police vans, and masked police are twisting people’s arms,” Mr Yashin said on Facebook.

Moscow police said about 200 people had been detained.

Many of the conference participants did not wear masks, while some were members of an organisation whose work had been declared “undesirable,” police said.

Mr Pivovarov, speaking from a police station, said the forum participants had been detained because authorities believed the conference was organised by Open Russia, a movement founded by Mr Khodorkovsky and designated as an “undesirable organisation”.

The municipal forum — the first of its kind — was organised by United Democrats, another project backed by Mr Khodor­kovsky. The authorities had appeared to look for a pretext to interrupt an opposition event.

Mr Pivovarov said police admitted to him they had been under pressure to clamp down on the Kremlin critics.

“Cops are laughing at what they are doing,” he said.

Open Russia was banned in Russia in 2017 in line with a law targeting foreign groups accused of political meddling.

AFP