Sasha, 17, was one of hundreds of peaceful citizens detained in cities across Russian Federation on Sunday after they defied the authorities and came out in support of opposition figure and blogger Alexei Navalny who dares to challenge Vladimir Putin for the presidency next year.
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“Detaining peaceful protesters, human rights observers and journalists is an affront to core democratic values”, said spokesman Mark Toner, who also decried the arrest of Navalny and the raid on his anti-corruption group’s office.
More than 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow on Sunday during an anti-corruption protest, one of the largest unauthorised rallies to take place during Putin’s 17 years in power as president or prime minister. But the Russian authorities have so far failed to meet those needs, offering the young generation only a “fake new image” and “falsehood from morning to evening”, Krupnov explained.
The protest in Tambov had been banned by authorities.
A spokeswoman for the Anticorruption Foundation said the arrests were “an obvious attempt to disrupt the work of the organization”.
Vladimir Isachenkov is an Associated Press writer.
Tens of thousands of anti-corruption protesters took to the streets across Russian Federation on Sunday in the biggest show of defiance since 2011-12 anti-government protests. “I did it and got hit on the head, dragged into the bus”. She has a court appearance next month for attending an illegal protest.
The instructor at the Moscow Conservatory resigned on 28 March after a video emerged of her attack on opposition parties and activists, whom she called “fifth columnists” and “traitors”, RFE/RL reports.
The U.S. and the European Union have criticized the crackdown and urged Russian Federation to release all detainees, but President Vladimir Putin has rejected the criticism as meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. Authorities in Tambov tightly control the media. In other words, how much worse does the economic situation in Russia have to be in order for the people to protest, despite propaganda which says everything is great and any problems are temporary and have nothing to do with the Russian political system?
Most Russians receive their news from state-run television, which mostly ignored Navalny’s YouTube expose and his call for protest.
The driving force behind the protests was Alexei Navalny, a 40-year-old anti-corruption campaigner who uses the Internet to spread his message, bypassing the state-controlled television stations where almost all older Russians get their news. Denis Lugovskoi, an engineering student who demonstrated in Orel, 325km (200 miles) south of Moscow, says they were aimed at the whole political elite. “I just said I was going for a walk”.
Tens of thousands of people took part in the anticorruption demonstrations in dozens of cities across Russian Federation on March 26. In Tambov, 200 to 300 people took to the streets in the first act of public discontent since nationwide protests against electoral fraud in 2011 and 2012. Many were quite young.
The protests on Sunday were triggered by the apparent indifference of the Russian authorities to the investigative 50-minute documentary, He Is Not Dimon To You. He posted a selfie on Twitter from there, saying, “A time will come when we’ll put them on trial too – and that time it will be fair”. Police told those on the street that the protest was unsanctioned and asked them to move on.
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But Sunday’s rally also proved a test of the power of the internet. If you would like to discuss another topic, look for a relevant article. And one of the Kremlin’s chief ideological weapons, the fear of returning to the chaos of the 1990s, is lost on a generation that has no memory of it. Numerous organizers five years ago had already passed their political zenith, including Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister who was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015.
