A court yesterday sentenced Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny to 15 days in prison, saying he had disobeyed a police officer during an anti-government protest in Moscow on Sunday.
The same court had earlier fined the lawyer turned Kremlin critic/activist 20,000 roubles (US$352) for his role in organizing the protest in Moscow and other cities, which the authorities said were illegal.
Olga Mikhailova, Navalny’s lawyer, told reporters that she had expected such a verdict and would appeal it.
Photo: Reuters
A Reuters reporter saw Navalny being loaded into a van, which was quickly surrounded by supporters holding placards reading “We believe” and “Alexei, we are with you.”
Police on Sunday detained Navalny, who hopes to run against Russian President Vladimir Putin in next year’s presidential elections, as he walked along central Moscow’s Tverskaya Street with supporters.
The Kremlin yesterday condemned Sunday’s anti-corruption protests as a “provocation” and said that minors had been offered money in case they were arrested while demonstrating.
“Essentially what we saw yesterday in several places — probably especially in Moscow — is a provocation and a lie,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
He said youths had been “promised financial rewards in the event of their detention by law enforcement agencies” during the protests, but did not give a source for this information when asked by journalists, although he described it as a “fact.”
Navalny had urged supporters to take to the streets in protest after his team published a report alleging that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev controlled a vast property empire through a net of obscure foundations.
More than 1,000 people were detained in Moscow and hundreds more in other cities across Russia after most municipal authorities refused to grant permission for the protests.
About 7,000 to 8,000 people demonstrated in the heart of the Russian capital, according to police, making it one of the biggest unauthorized rallies in recent years.
Peskov said without mentioning Navalny by name that the Kremlin was worried that “some people will continue using [politically] active people ... to their own ends, calling them to illegal and unauthorized actions.”
Asked what the Kremlin thought about the scale of protests — by far the biggest to rock Russia in years — Peskov said he “neither overestimates nor underestimates this scale.”
About 1,030 people were arrested at the Moscow rally, according OVD-Info, a Web site that monitors the detention of activists.
The vast majority were released overnight after being fined, while about 120 remained in police custody yesterday, OVD-Info said.
“I am proud of those who took to the streets today,” Navalny wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “You are the country’s best people and Russia’s hope for a normal future.”
Liberal business newspaper Vedomosti said that the protests were reminiscent of the mass anti-government rallies that swept Russia in 2011 over vote-rigging after a parliamentary election, which snowballed into the biggest challenge against Putin since he took power in 2000.
The US and the EU voiced deep concern about the detentions, with the US Department of State describing them as an “affront to democracy.”
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