Regardless of the specter of yearslong jail phrases, hundreds of Russians joined anti-war rallies throughout the nation Sunday in a hanging present of the pent-up anger in Russian society about President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Police reported greater than 3,000 arrests — the best nationwide whole formally reported in any single day of protest in latest reminiscence. An activist group that tracks arrests, OVD-Information, reported detentions in 49 Russian cities.
Video from unbiased Russian information shops protecting the protests confirmed throngs of individuals chanting “No to struggle!” on St. Petersburg’s central avenue, Nevsky Prospekt, and on Moscow’s Manezhnaya Sq., simply exterior the Kremlin partitions. Different clips confirmed protesters being overwhelmed and kicked by police, together with subsequent to a stand of balloons and present packing containers inside Moscow’s storied youngsters’s division retailer, Detsky Mir — subsequent door to the headquarters of the home intelligence company, the FSB.
Within the metropolis of Kaliningrad close to the Baltic Sea, a girl protesting the struggle was recorded in a video posted on Twitter telling a police officer that she had survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
“Are you right here to help the fascists?” the officer responded, repeating the Kremlin narrative concerning the struggle in Ukraine, earlier than calling over different policemen and telling them: “Arrest all of them.”
The hundreds of Russians who protested Sunday represented solely a slice of these livid over the invasion. Hundreds extra fled the nation up to now 10 days, as their financial savings evaporated amid the collapse of the ruble and the West’s crushing sanctions.
“There is no such thing as a extra Russia,” Anton Dolin, one in every of Russia’s best-known movie critics, wrote Sunday, asserting his departure. “We're struggling a disaster — no, not an financial or political one. This can be a ethical disaster.”
In a cellphone interview from Latvia, Dolin, 46, described how he spent 4 hours within the chilly ready to cross the border on foot Saturday together with his spouse, two youngsters, their canine and some suitcases.
“We now have realized we're most likely departing for a very long time,” he mentioned. “We by no means ready for this departure, and by no means in our lives even thought we might ever depart Russia.”
Putin remained defiant, regardless of cellphone calls with the presidents of France and Turkey on Sunday through which each leaders urged Russia to contemplate a cease-fire.
“An finish to the particular operation is just doable if Kyiv stops its army motion and fulfills Russia’s well-known calls for,” the Kremlin mentioned.
By Sunday, the Russian authorities had blocked entry contained in the nation to the web sites of just about all well-liked unbiased media shops reporting on the struggle. Putin on Friday signed a legislation punishing “false information” concerning the struggle with jail sentences of as much as 15 years.
This text initially appeared in The New York Instances.