This news report was published on the Times website in August 2019, reproduced below: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/moscow-police-make-mass-arrests-in-unauthorised-demonstration-gzghhtpjb
Police detained hundreds of protesters during an unauthorised opposition demonstration on the streets of Moscow today. Authorities also launched an anti-corruption probe into the leading Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who had encouraged the protests on his blog.
Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg in response to the Russian government’s attempt to keep opposition activists off the ballot paper for September’s city council elections.
More than 600 people were detained by police in the capital and at least six were beaten with truncheons by police, according to the non-governmental organisation OVD-info, which operates a hotline for detainees.
The council has only municipal powers, but the poll, seen as a dry run for a national parliamentary election in 2021, has become a focus point for grassroots resistance to Vladimir Putin’s regime. Putin has tightened his grip on signs of political upheaval in Russia’s cities since Navalny succeeded in taking more than a quarter of the vote in a 2013 Moscow mayoral election.
One of those arrested earlier today was Lyubov Sobol, a young lawyer and Navalny ally who has been on hunger strike for three weeks. She was manhandled by officers and forced into a police van, according to the Associated Press. Navalny was still in jail today after he was arrested for his role in organising protests without permission. The 43-year-old lawyer was briefly rushed to hospital last Sunday after an episode his lawyer and doctor described as a poisoning attempt, but that officials dismissed as an allergic reaction.
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