MOSCOW: Tens of thousands of Russians staged what a monitoring group called the country’s biggest political protest for eight years on Saturday, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow’s city legislature.

Police rounded up scores of people after the demonstration in Moscow and at another rally in St Petersburg, and detained a leading opposition figure before it began. But the response from the authorities was milder than the previous week when more than 1,000 protesters were detained, sometimes violently.

The White Counter monitoring group said up to 60,000 people had attended the Moscow rally, describing it as the biggest in Russia for eight years. Police put turnout at 20,000.

A month of demonstrations over elections for the Moscow city legislature have turned into the biggest sustained protest movement in Russia since 2011-2013, when protesters took to the streets against perceived electoral fraud.

Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared “down with the tzar!” and waved Russian flags. They are demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month after they were not allowed onto the ballot.

“The authorities have become brazen. It’s time to defend our rights,” said Natalya Plokhova, a recruiting consultant.

As the scenes unfolded in Moscow, President Vladimir Putin was shown on state television in a leather jacket at a biker show organized by the Night Wolves motorcycle club on the peninsula of Crimea which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Putin and the Kremlin have so far avoided commenting on the unrest over the Moscow city elections.

OVD-Info, a monitoring body, said 221 people were arrested at Saturday’s demonstration in Moscow and 80 in St Petersburg. A small number of other arrests took place in other cities, including Rostov-on-Don and Bryansk.

The Moscow protest was held with official permission, unlike last week’s demonstration. Afterwards, hundreds of mostly young people chanting “Putin is a thief” began gathering near the presidential administration building, prompting masked riot police to ring off the area and detain dozens.

Authorities had earlier warned protesters not to continue protesting after the officially authorized event. Until that point the rally had largely passed without major incident, apart from isolated police detentions and a smoke grenade set off nearby.

Ahead of the rally, police detained hunger-striking opposition activist Lyubov Sobol. Masked men raided her office and the police said they had information she and other activists were plotting a “provocation” at Saturday’s rally.

“I won’t make it to the protest. But you know what to do without me….Russia will be free!” Sobol wrote on Twitter.

Some pro-Kremlin politicians and officials have suggested that the West has helped orchestrate the protests. Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and at least seven of his allies are in jail for breaking protest law.

Investigators have opened criminal proceedings against about a dozen people for what they say was mass civil unrest at earlier protests, a crime that carries a heavy jail term. They have also opened a money-laundering investigation into Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation.

Throngs of protesters, sheltering from rain under umbrellas, chanted “freedom for political prisoners” and “Russia will be free”. Several Russian musicians with youth followings, including rapper Face and electronic band Ic3peak, performed at the rally despite city authorities saying that would be banned.

The focus of protesters’ anger is a prohibition on a slew of opposition-minded candidates, some of whom are allies of Navalny, from taking part in a September election for Moscow’s city legislature. That vote is seen as a dry run for a national parliamentary election in 2021.

Authorities say the opposition candidates failed to collect enough genuine signatures to register. The excluded candidates say that is a lie and insist on taking part in a contest they believe they could win.

The ruling United Russia party’s popularity rating is at its lowest since 2011 and President Vladimir Putin’s own rating has fallen due to discontent over falling living standards.

At well over 60%, it is still high compared to many other world leaders however, and last year the 66-year-old former KGB intelligence officer won a landslide re-election and a new six-year term until 2024. </s> People with national flags and various political parties flags gather during a protest in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. Masses of people gathered in central Moscow to demand that opposition candidates be included on ballots for an upcoming city parliament election in September. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

MOSCOW (AP) — Tens of thousands of people rallied Saturday against the exclusion of some city council candidates from Moscow’s upcoming election, turning out for one of the Russian capital’s biggest political protests in years.

After the rally, which was officially sanctioned, hundreds of participants streamed to an area near the presidential administration building to continue with an unauthorized demonstration. They were confronted by phalanxes of riot police and the arrest-monitoring group OVD-Info said 136 people were detained.

The rally was the fourth consecutive weekend demonstration in Moscow over the local election. The determined opposition has prompted protests in other cities, reflecting widespread frustration with Russia’s tightly controlled politics.

The protest attracted some 50,000 people, said Beliy Schetchik, an organization that counts public meeting attendance.

OVD-Info also said 86 people were arrested Saturday in St. Petersburg at an unsanctioned demonstration in support of the Moscow protests.

Unlike the previous two Moscow rallies, where police harshly dispersed the crowds and detained thousands of demonstrators, Saturday’s gathering in a neighborhood with relatively few passers-by was officially sanctioned.

It was held on a street flanked by high buildings and sandwiched between two busy thoroughfares.

Lyubov Sobol, one of the city council candidates denied a place on the ballot and a spearhead of the election protest, was among those detained in Moscow on Saturday.

A video on Sobol’s Twitter feed showed officers breaking into her office as she demanded an explanation from them.

Small related protests also were reported in several Siberian cities on Saturday. </s> Tens of thousands of people have joined one of Moscow’s biggest political protests in recent years, denouncing the exclusion of opposition and independent candidates from the Russian capital’s city council ballot.

Tens of thousands of people have joined one of Moscow’s biggest political protests in recent years, denouncing the exclusion of opposition and independent candidates from the Russian capital’s city council ballot.

The rally on Saturday was the fourth consecutive weekend demonstration in Moscow over the local election. The determined opposition has also prompted protests in other cities, reflecting widespread frustration with Russia’s tightly controlled politics.

An arrest monitoring group said 70 people were arrested in St Petersburg at an unsanctioned demonstration in support of the Moscow protests.

OVD-Info said 10 people were detained in connection with the Moscow rally, but it was not immediately clear on what grounds.

A group that monitors attendance of public meetings, Beliye Schetchik, said it counted about 50,000 people at the Moscow demonstration. A police estimate put the crowd at 20,000.

Unlike the previous Moscow protests, where police harshly dispersed the crowds and detained thousands of demonstrators, the latest gathering in a neighbourhood with relatively few passers-by was officially sanctioned.

It was held on a street flanked by high buildings and sandwiched between two busy thoroughfares.

Lyubov Sobol, one of the city council candidates denied a place on the ballot and a spearhead of the election protest, was among those detained in Moscow on Saturday.

A video on Ms Sobol’s Twitter feed showed officers breaking into her office as she demanded an explanation from them. </s> Nearly 50,000 people took to Moscow’s streets to rally for fair elections on a rainy Saturday despite weeks of heavy crackdowns, making it one of Russia’s largest protests in several years. This summer’s protest movement, which began as a standoff between opposition figures and Moscow authorities over the barring of independent candidates from an upcoming local election, has gradually gained support from citizens since it began five weeks ago. Independent polling this week said that Moscow residents are more likely to support the protests than oppose them.

“50,000 is a number that the authorities simply can’t ignore,” said Konstantin Gaaze, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. “This sends out a very strong signal and shows that there is real solidarity among protesters.” This week’s event was largely held in support of those who have been detained and arrested — sometimes violently — over previous protests. Chants calling on Russia to free its political prisoners could be heard along with chants in support of the rejected candidates. Attendants wore shirts and held up signs in support of Yegor Zhukov, a 21-year-old student who faces up to eight years in prison on “mass unrest” charges, as well as the students who had been detained while picketing Zhukov’s arrest.

The solidarity has spread outside the capital, with several other Russian cities staging their own protests in solidarity this weekend. The Moscow event “showed that there are many more non-loyal people than the Kremlin hoped for,” said political analyst and former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky. “These people aren’t the traditional opposition, but a much wider group.” This included celebrities and popular musicians, including YouTube blogger Yury Dud, who has an audience of millions and had previously been largely apolitical. The protest saw performances from three musical acts — IC3PEAK, Krovostok and Face — all of whom are well-known to Russian listeners. “I had to perform today to show my support,” Anton Chernyak, the lead singer of Krovostok, told The Moscow Times. “It’s great so many people turned up.” Moscow authorities had authorized a rally for up to 100,000 people following two weekends of unauthorized protests that saw a heavy police crackdown with thousands detained. This weekend’s event in Moscow saw only 23 detentions, according to the police-monitoring OVD-Info website, while 78 people were detained at a similar protest in St. Petersburg, 10 in Rostov-on-Don and two in Briyansk.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior associate at Carnegie Moscow Center, said the rally’s approval from the authorities helped boost attendance this week. “It’s natural that people are scared to go to unsanctioned protests,” he told The Moscow Times. Even so, this week’s turnout dwarfed the numbers of the last authorized rally, which was attended by 22,000 people. Alexander Solovyov, one of the rejected opposition candidates and ex-chairman of the pro-democracy movement Open Russia, said that the growing momentum is “a victory for the opposition” — but he stressed that the opposition’s work isn’t done yet. “Some people think that coming out once is enough. We need to keep on protesting every weekend to keep the momentum going,” he told The Moscow Times. </s> MOSCOW — Thousands of Russians are expected to rally again in Moscow on Saturday to demand free elections despite a police crackdown and a refusal by authorities to meet protesters’ demands.

It will be the fourth consecutive week when large numbers of people have taken to the streets of the Russian capital to demand opposition-minded candidates be allowed to run in a Moscow election next month – something the authorities have so far refused to allow.

Saturday’s protest has been authorized by city authorities, but a similar protest a week earlier was not and police detained more than 1,000 people, sometimes violently, part of one of the biggest crackdowns on dissent in recent years.

Investigators have opened criminal proceedings against about a dozen people for what they term as mass civil unrest in relation to previous protests, a crime that carries a heavy jail term. They have also opened a money-laundering investigation into Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation.

Some pro-Kremlin politicians and officials have suggested that the West has helped orchestrate the protests. Navalny and at least seven of his allies are currently in jail for breaking protest law.

Several famous musicians have said they want to perform at Saturday’s protest, something the authorities have rejected.

Some opposition activists have also said they plan to walk through central Moscow afterwards, setting up a possible confrontation with police who say they will not tolerate trouble.

Navalny allies have also called for a nationwide protest on Saturday though it is unclear how many people that might attract.

The focus of protesters’ anger is a prohibition on a slew of opposition-minded candidates, some of whom are allies of Navalny, from taking part in a September election for Moscow’s city legislature.

That vote, though local, is seen as a dry run for a national parliamentary election in 2021.

Authorities say the opposition candidates failed to collect enough genuine signatures to register.

The excluded candidates say that is a lie and insist on taking part in a contest they believe they could win.

The ruling United Russia party’s rating is at its lowest since 2011 and President Vladimir Putin’s own rating has fallen due to discontent over falling living standards.

At well over 60 percent, it is still high compared to many other world leaders however and last year the 66-year-old former KGB intelligence officer won a landslide re-election and a new six-year term until 2024. (Additional reporting by Tom Balmforth, Maria Kiselyova, Maria Tsvetkova and Gleb Stolyarov Writing by Andrew Osborn Editing by Angus MacSwan) </s> People with national flags and various political parties flags gather during a protest in Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. Masses of people gathered in central Moscow to demand that opposition candidates be included on ballots for an upcoming city parliament election in September. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

MOSCOW (AP) — Tens of thousands of people rallied Saturday in one of Moscow’s biggest political protests in recent years, denouncing the exclusion of opposition and independent candidates from the Russian capital’s city council ballot.

The rally was the fourth consecutive weekend demonstration in Moscow over the local election. The determined opposition has prompted protests in other cities, reflecting widespread frustration with Russia’s tightly controlled politics.

An arrest monitoring group said 70 people were arrested Saturday in St. Petersburg at an unsanctioned demonstration in support of the Moscow protests.

OVD-Info said 10 people were detained in connection with the Moscow rally, but it was not immediately clear on what grounds.

Unlike the previous two Moscow rallies, where police harshly dispersed the crowds and detained thousands of demonstrators, Saturday’s gathering in a neighborhood with relatively few passers-by was officially sanctioned.

It was held on a street flanked by high buildings and sandwiched between two busy thoroughfares.

A group that monitors attendance of public meetings, Beliy Schetchik, said it counted about 50,000 people at the demonstration; a police estimate put the crowd at 20,000.

Some opposition figures called for an unauthorized march to follow the permitted rally, but it was unclear if the action would materialize.

Lyubov Sobol, one of the city council candidates denied a place on the ballot and a spearhead of the election protest, was among those detained in Moscow on Saturday.

A video on Sobol’s Twitter feed showed officers breaking into her office as she demanded an explanation from them.

Small related protests also were reported in several Siberian cities on Saturday.

This story has been corrected to show that Saturday marked the fourth consecutive weekend of Moscow election protests, not the third. A rally was held on Sunday, July 14. </s> Aug. 10 (UPI) -- About 50,000 took to the streets of Moscow to demonstrate for fair elections in the Russian's capital's largest protest in years.

The protesters, who obtained a permit prior to the demonstration, demanded that opposition candidates banned from City Council elections be returned to the ballot and called for authorities to release demonstrators detained by authorities during previous rallies.

The protest, the largest since crowds of people took to the streets to mourn slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015, coincided with similar demonstrations of solidarity in cities across the country.

OVD Info, a police monitoring group, said at least 275 opposition protesters were detained across the country Saturday, including 178 in Moscow.

Several people were detained after the end of the sanctioned protest, when crowds marched toward a government building.

The demonstration was the latest since earlier in the summer, when officials announced multiple opposition candidates would not be allowed on the Moscow City Council election ballot. Officials alleged the candidates' applications contained faked signatures.

Opposition supporters said the signature faking allegations were invented by President Vladimir Putin's government to prevent opposition candidates from seeking office. </s> Moscow police detained more than 1,000 people including several prominent independent politicians Saturday and blocked the city’s major thoroughfares in an attempt to prevent a protest demanding that opposition candidates be allowed to run in a city council election.

Heavy police presence throughout the city kept what police estimated were at least 3,500 people from participating in the protest. The demonstration was the latest in a series of protests over the last month against the Moscow city government’s rejection of applications from independent candidates to run for the 45-seat Moscow city council on the Sept. 8 ballot.

While the protest, and others elsewhere in Russia, was sparked by a feeling of disenfranchisement in the local government decision-making process, the anger appears to have the Kremlin concerned. Trust in the central government has dropped in recent months, a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin was re elected to a fourth term by a landslide. Much of the hostility is due to Putin’s support for an unpopular pension bill that raises the retirement age by five years. In addition, Russia’s economy is stagnating while real incomes shrink and inflation rises.

Opposition leaders had called for Saturday’s protest to begin in front of Moscow City Hall on the Russian capital city’s Tverskaya Street, a broad avenue lined with Stalin-era buildings that ends at the Red Square and the Kremlin’s red walls.

Police cordoned off the sidewalks near the city hall hours early to prevent people from gathering. Walls of police officers in riot gear locked arms to form columns that pushed demonstrators into side streets, where small skirmishes between protesters and police ensued. Many were beaten with batons before being dragged into police buses and taken to detention centers.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin sent out warnings earlier in the week that Saturday’s protest was unsanctioned and said participants would be prosecuted. In a tweet Saturday morning, Sobyanin said the opposition was planning provocations that could put city the public’s safety as risk.

Sobyanin’s warning showed that the government was clearly shaken by last weekend’s demonstration in a Moscow central square that saw 22,000 protesters calling for free and fair elections. That city government had granted a permit for that protest but were surprised when it grew into one of the largest in Moscow since 2012, when tens of thousands demonstrated against election fraud and government authoritarianism.

This month’s protests started after the Moscow Election Committee declared ineligible several independent candidates’ applications to run for a city council seat in a September election. The council currently is dominated by the Kremlin-favored United Russian party.

In recent days, Alexei Navalny, a leading opposition leader and fierce critic of Putin, was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in jail for organizing an unsanctioned demonstration. Police then searched the homes of and arrested at least four other opposition candidates seeking to get on the ballot and opened an investigation into their participation in a demonstration held outside of the election commission July 14.

The protests come at a time when Russians across the country are voicing their frustrations about a lack of local participation in regional issues. In the last two years, large protests with several thousand people have sprung up in regional capitals and in provincial cities outside of Moscow to demand the closure of garbage dumps. In Ekaterinburg, Russia’s third largest city, thousands protested against the city’s plans to build a large cathedral in one of its last remaining central parks. Authorities then agreed to relocate the cathedral’s construction site.

In Moscow, demonstrators said they were tired of blatant corruption associated with an expensive makeover program that has torn up and replaced sidewalks and streets across the city of nearly 13 million people. As lucrative procurement deals have been approved by City Hall, residents have had little say on the spending, protesters said.

“The government has made a mistake, and it’s showing its weakness,” said Viktor Yelkin, 69, a retired military officer. “The powers don’t want to let the opposition candidates on the ballot because they know that people will vote for them.”

Clashes between police and demonstrators lasted for several hours in downtown Moscow, where at least 638 were detained, according to OVD-Info, an independent monitoring agency. </s> Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police marched away detainees on the 27 July protest

Police in Moscow have detained more than 1,000 people at a rally, in one of the biggest crackdowns in years.

Demonstrators were dragged away from the city hall as security forces used batons against the crowd.

People were protesting against the exclusion of opposition candidates from local polls. The opposition say they were barred for political reasons.

Some of the candidates banned from standing in the 8 September election had been detained earlier.

Officials disqualified about 30 people, saying they had failed to collect enough valid signatures to stand.

At least 1,074 arrests were made at the banned rally, officials say, while monitors reported 1,127 detentions.

Moscow's Mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has called the demonstration a "security threat", and promised to maintain public order.

Anger is widespread among opposition supporters at the way the city is run and the ruling United Russia party.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed for 30 days on Wednesday after calling for Saturday's unapproved demonstration.

Mr Putin was on a trip to the Baltic Sea on Saturday for a dive in a submersible. "There are a lot of problems on Earth, so to diminish their amount one has to go up and deep down," he remarked.

What happened this Saturday?

Last Saturday, more than 20,000 Russians took to the streets, demanding fair elections, and dozens were arrested.

It is unclear how many people turned up for the new unauthorised rally on 27 July but the numbers seem to have been sharply down.

According to police, about 3,500 people gathered, including about 700 journalists.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Riot police detained hundreds of protesters on Saturday

Police in riot gear pushed back the crowd from barriers surrounding the mayor's office in central Moscow, hauling off detainees to police stations.

A number of protesters could be seen bleeding while at least two members of the security forces reportedly received eye injuries from pepper spray.

A powerful message to the regions?

Oleg Boldyrev, BBC News, Moscow

No -one was under any illusion that the large gathering would impress authorities into letting people express themselves peacefully. This rally went very much the same way others have done - arbitrary detentions, standoffs, crowds breaking off into the side streets.

The question is whether the anger over not being able to nominate a candidate - even for lower-level, city elections - would galvanise Muscovites into bigger, sustained expressions of dissent. After all, there are lots of residents not happy with the way Moscow government and Mayor Sobyanin run the city, or respond to popular concerns.

Image copyright Reuters

Certainly, the would-be candidates, most of them seasoned anti-Putin activists, are hoping that the resentment will linger. That is exactly why policy handlers in the Kremlin are desperate to put a lid on it.

With both Mr Putin's ratings falling and the United Russia party deeply unpopular, chanting crowds in the capital may send a very powerful message to other regions preparing to hold their elections.

How did we get here?

Local elections usually attract little attention in Russia.

The Moscow authority does not control the city's budget or choose key official appointments, and previous votes have passed without major protests or press interest.

But this year some Muscovites are infuriated at what they see as brazen attempts to disqualify independent politicians from running.

Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption Lyubov Sobol is one of the opposition candidates barred from standing

Candidates were asked to collect 5,000 signatures to stand. This limit was made even harder to match because a signature "means volunteering one's personal information for the government's database of opposition supporters", democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza wrote in the Washington Post.

Many candidates managed to meet the threshold but the electoral commission ruled some signatures ineligible, saying they were unclear or the addresses provided were incomplete, and barred the candidates from taking part.

Opposition groups say the authorities had no reason to rule them ineligible - claims that electoral officials denied. "We have no reason to doubt our experts," commission member Dmitry Reut said, according to media reports.

Mr Navalny, who addressed the crowds last Saturday, is not one of the candidates, although he stood in Moscow's mayoral elections in 2013 and won 27% of the vote in a result he disputed.

Ella Pamfilova, the head of the electoral commission, said the protests would not change their decisions. "It doesn't matter, not even a bit of it," she said, dismissing the demonstrations as "political".

The authorities banned this Saturday's rally on the grounds that there were threats of violence against the commission.

Police then raided the homes of several opposition politicians, and called them in more for questioning.

What's been the reaction?

Election candidate and opposition leader Dmitry Gudkov tweeted that the council had "died under Putin".

"The last illusion that we are able to participate legally in politics has disappeared."

Some newspapers also denounced the raids. Novaya Gazeta ran the headline Moscow City Terror on Friday, while Vedomosti said authorities were using force to suppress the protest "having failed to counter it with political means".

Skip Twitter post by @BBCSteveR After a wave of police searches & detention of opposition activists in Moscow, one Russian paper today claims that “political terror in Russia is flourishing” & warns that “one day the terror will rebound on those who started it.” #ReadingRussia pic.twitter.com/TedBt3bkZE — Steve Rosenberg (@BBCSteveR) July 26, 2019 Report

Russian government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, however, accused the opposition of "blackmail" and "an unacceptable attitude to the statutes of law".

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told BBC Russian that the official response was designed to dissuade people from taking part. Any mass action would suggest the opposition had taken the initiative from the government.

Some believe the demonstrations could actually benefit the local authorities by reducing turnout.

"Young opposition supporters will not come to the polls, while the older generation whom the authorities are counting on vote out of habit," Denis Volkov, an expert at independent think tank Levada Center, told the BBC. "The authorities will orient themselves towards them."
As many as 50,000 people gathered at ongoing protests in Moscow against the Russian authorities preventing several opposition candidates from running in the election, which turned into a protest against the government in general. It is the biggest such event since the 2011 protests.