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Russian Police Deploy Batons, Tasers As More Than 4,000 Detained Amid Nationwide Protests
By RFE/RL January 31, 2021
MOSCOW -- Russian police used batons and tasers on peaceful protesters after tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets for a second-straight weekend to demand the release of jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny and voice their discontent with the government.
Riot police left some protesters bloody and badly beaten as they detained more than 4,000 participants of the unsanctioned rallies called for by Navalny and his team.
The severity of the Russian police tactics -- which also included leaving some detainees lying in the snow -- drew parallels for many analysts to the actions over the past six months by law enforcement in Belarus, where protesters against the continued rule of strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenko have been harshly beaten.
The United States, the European Union, and human rights organizations condemned the violence by Russian police against their own citizens as well as the detention of reporters.
By late evening in Moscow, the number of people detained across Russia had reached more than 4,500, surpassing the total of the previous weekend, according to the independent monitoring group OVD-Info.
The January 31 detentions were the largest since the group began keeping tallies a decade ago.
Amnesty International said that Russia has arrested so many people in Moscow that detention centers in the capital have "run out of space" and people are being held in deportation facilities.
"Trying to lock up every critic in the country is a losing game -- the Russian authorities should instead recognize how much the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression mean to a growing number of Russians, and allow people to express their opinions without fear of retaliation," the rights watchdog said in a statement following the protest.
Like last weekend, the January 31 protests took place in more than 100 cities in what some are calling the largest anti-government rallies by geography since Russian President Vladimir Putin took power at the end of 1999.
"This is the biggest protest phenomenon in the entire time of Putin's presidency, in all 20 years. It will be difficult to estimate its size, but its geography -- the number of cities -- is unprecedented. We see a different generation of protesters who are not afraid," Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, told the Ekho Moskvy radio station.
Large-scale protests took place in Moscow over several months following parliamentary elections in December 2011 that were deemed fraudulent. Additional mass demonstrations took place in the capital in 2015 following the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and again in 2019 following Moscow parliamentary elections.
While the number of people protesting in Moscow over the past two weekends may have been smaller than those earlier protests, participation in Russia's regions was greater.
Protesters in the Far East and Siberia braved subfreezing temperatures and a heavy riot-police presence to start the day's demonstrations.
Video clips from Vladivostok, where hundreds of demonstrators were denied access to the city center, showed participants linking hands and chanting "Putin is a thief!" and "My Russia is in prison!" on the ice of Amur Bay. The demonstrations there ended after about two hours.
In Irkutsk, where 24 people were reportedly arrested, protesters were filmed being detained after police moved in to break up a rally in the city center.
Live footage from Current Time showed a heavy police presence in the Urals city of Perm before the demonstration there ended.
Protesters in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, were shown on social media clashing with riot police. Video later showed several detainees in Kazan lying cuffed in the snow.
In Moscow, hundreds of people, including Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya, were arrested. Some were detained as they made their way to the detention center where the activist is being held
One protester in Moscow told Current Time that he attended the rally despite the threat of arrests and beatings because he wanted to see an improvement in life inside Russia.
Participating in the protests "is like work for each citizen who wants his country to become better. I don't want to attend, but I will because it is necessary," he said.
As the number of detentions nationwide rose on January 31, Navalny's team issued a statement on Telegram requesting that protesters not touch police and avoid getting "fooled by provocations."
The police crackdown did not leave reporters unscathed.
Video posted on social media showed police beating a journalist wearing a press vest in the northern city. The journalist, Georgy Markov, reportedly claimed he was tased by police.
An accredited freelance correspondent working for RFE/RL's Russian Service, Andrei Afanasyev, was detained in the Far East city of Blagoveshchensk as he was heading to cover protests there.
In St. Petersburg, one police officer waved a baton in front of a RFE/RL journalist's face when questioned why he was detaining one of the more than 480 people reportedly arrested there.
Overall, 35 journalists were detained nationwide, with eight in St. Petersburg, according to the Center For Monitoring Violations Of The Rights Of Russian Journalists And Media.
In a tweet, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said that he deplored the "widespread detentions and disproportionate use of force" against protesters and journalists in Russia and that the country "needs to comply with its international commitments."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meanwhile, said that the United States "condemns the persistent use of harsh tactics against peaceful protesters and journalists by Russian authorities for a second week straight. We renew our call for Russia to release those detained for exercising their human rights, including Aleksei Navalny."
In response, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the United States of "gross interference" in Russia's affairs and accused Washington of promoting calls for what Moscow considers illegal rallies by unspecified "online platforms controlled by Washington."
Russian authorities had braced for another groundswell of protests nationwide after Navalny and his team again called on supporters and disgruntled citizens to take to the streets on January 31.
On January 23, tens of thousands of people in more than 110 cities heeded the activist's call to demonstrate against his arrest. Police detained almost 4,000 people that day in one of the largest protests in years.
Ahead of the January 31 protest, police issued warnings that participants at "illegal" rallies would face criminal charges for violating coronavirus-related health restrictions.
Authorities then moved swiftly against Navalny's closest allies, the media, and common supporters in a bid to quell an outpouring of dissent through a wave of detentions and acts of intimidation.
Police partially shut down transport in the nation's two largest cities in an attempt to dampen the number of participants and foil their plans.
In Moscow, the site of the largest rally, Navalny's team had to delay the beginning of their procession by an hour after police shut down seven subway stations and blocked streets.
Protesters in the capital had been called upon to gather in Lubyanka Square outside the headquarters of the FSB security agency and Staraya Square, where the presidential administration has its offices.
However, after police cordoned off the area the protest was moved further from the center.
Current Time correspondent Yevgenia Kotlyar reported live that she had never seen such a large number of police in the center of the capital, and that they were "even blocking entrances to courtyards."
Outside Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina detention center, where Navalny is being held, large numbers of police stood guard as buses delivering demonstrators arrived.
Calls for Navalny to be released have echoed from the streets of Russia to Western capitals, with the European Union, United States, and others demanding he be set free.
The 44-year-old anti-corruption crusader and Kremlin critic was detained on January 17 upon his returned from Germany, where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he and supporters say was carried out by the FSB on the orders of President Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin has dismissed extensive evidence that FSB agents poisoned Navalny and rejected calls for his release.
A day after his return to Russia a makeshift court at a police station ordered Navalny to remain in jail for 30 days pending trial, set to start on February 2.
Prosecutors claim he broke the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence in an embezzlement case the European Court for Human Rights ruled was "arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable."
The February 2 court hearing will consider converting the suspended sentence into a 3 1/2 year prison term because of the alleged parole violation while Navalny was recovering in Germany.
With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian Service, Current Time, AP, AFP, Reuters
Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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