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> Moscow (CNN) Hundreds of protesters have been arrested by police in the center of Moscow Saturday, in a crackdown on opposition supporters demanding free and fair elections.

Thousands of Russians pledged to attend the protest in the capital Saturday, after Russian authorities banned a number of independent and opposition candidates from taking part in municipal elections in September.

Authorities stated that the candidates were barred from running because they had failed to obtain a sufficient number of signatures to be put on the ballot paper. Opposition politicians and supporters have rejected this allegation.

The decision has sparked a number of protests across Russia this month, including the largest demonstration in recent years last weekend, when 22,000 people took to the streets. Protesters threatened to hold an even larger demonstration Saturday, which was subsequently declared illegal by the authorities.

Protesters take to the streets of Moscow after a number of opposition politicians were barred from running in municipal elections in September.

Hundreds of riot police were witnessed preparing for the protests Saturday morning, and were later seen linking arms to form a line, pushing protesters away from Moscow's City Hall.

OVD-info, a Russian democracy monitoring organization, said that at least 561 people have been detained thus far during the protests.

CNN witnessed clashes between protesters and police, with at least two protesters left with bloodied faces.

Moscow police said that 3,500 people took part in the protests, including 700 journalists and bloggers.

"A significant number of detainees are not residents of Moscow. All detainees are brought to the territorial police units for investigation," the State Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow said in the statement.

A number of arrests and raids were also carried out on opposition candidates in the days and hours leading up to the protest.

Alexei Navalny, Russia's most outspoken opposition figure, was among those detained during the week, and was later sentenced to 30 days in prison for allegedly violating the country's protest laws by calling for the demonstrations Saturday.

Navalny said on Instagram that he was detained as he left his apartment to go on a jog. "People are right when they say that sport is not always good for your health," he quipped. "I have been detained and am now at a police station wearing shorts like a stupid man."

Dmitry Gudkov, a fellow disqualified candidate, was also detained hours before Saturday's protest. He had previously claimed that the country's future was at stake due to the barring of opposition candidates.

"If we lose now, elections will cease to exist as a political instrument," he said. "What we're talking about is whether it's legal to participate in politics today in Russia, we're talking about the country we're going to live in."

Ilya Yashin, an ally of Navalny, reported on Facebook that he had also been detained hours before the demonstration following a raid on his house, and had been taken out of the Russian capital.

Other prominent activists to be detained include Kira Yarmysh, Navalyny's spokeswoman, Lyubov Sobo and Ivan Zhdanov.

Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, warned on Twitter that police would react decisively to restore public order.

"According to information from law enforcement authorities, serious provocations are being prepared which pose a threat to the safety, lives and health of people," he said. "Attempts at ultimatums, disorder will not lead to anything good. Order in the city will be maintained." </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> MOSCOW (AP) - Thousands of people have gathered in central Moscow to protest against the exclusion of opposition and independent candidates from the city council ballot, the third consecutive weekend of rallies over the issue.

Saturday's demonstration has been sanctioned by city authorities, unlike the two previous protests in which thousands of people were detained, sometimes violently. But some opposition figures have called for an unauthorized march into the capital's center after the permitted rally.

Police on Saturday detained Lyubov Sobol, an unregistered candidate who has become a spearhead of the protest. A video on her Twitter feed showed police breaking into her office as she demanded an explanation from them.

The issue has spread dissatisfaction beyond Moscow; small protests were reported in several Siberian cities on Saturday.

A protester holds a poster reading: "It's we who choose here!" 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) </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 in central Moscow for the third consecutive weekend to protest the exclusion of opposition and independent candidates from the Russian capital’s city council ballot.

The protest on Saturday appeared to have by far the largest turnout of the recent rallies over an issue tapping strong dissatisfaction with Russia’s tightly controlled politics.

A group that monitors attendance of public meetings, Beliye Schetchik, said it counted about 40,000 people at the demonstration; a police estimate put the crowd at 20,000.

Unlike the previous two protests, which saw sometimes violent police crackdowns and thousands of arrests combined, the one on Saturday was sanctioned by city authorities.

Some opposition figures called for an unauthorized march to follow the permitted rally.

Police on Saturday detained Lyubov Sobol, one of the city council candidates denied a place on the ballot and a spearhead of the election protest.

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> Russian opposition candidate Russian and activist Ilya Yashin, center, gestures while speaking to a crowd next to a bas-relief of the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, left, during a protest in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, July 14, 2019. Opposition candidates who run for seats in the city legislature in September’s elections have complained that authorities try to bar them from the race by questioning the validity of signatures of city residents they must collect in order to qualify for the race. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian opposition leaders led a rally in Moscow of about 1,000 people Sunday to protest the city election commission’s decision that will keep several opposition candidates off the ballot in a local election.

The unsanctioned rally was billed as a meeting between opposition leaders and voters after the Moscow election commission rejected signatures needed to qualify the candidates for the September city parliament election.

Demonstrators chanted “We are the authority here!” and “Putin is a thief.”

Police made no effort to intervene until later in the evening, after the protest crowd had largely dispersed and opposition leaders called for the remaining participants to stage an overnight sit-in at the election commission.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was not seen at the protest. The demonstration was led, in various stages, by opposition figures Dmitry Gudkov, Ilya Yashin and Lyubov Sobol.

“We were collecting the signatures under rain and in the heat,” Gudkov said. “And you know what (the election commission) told us yesterday? They told us that our signatures are fake. Many of the people who gave me their signatures are here today. Friends, do you agree?”

Yashin, one of the disqualified candidates, called on the crowd to march with him to the mayor’s office to state their election demands. They knocked on the doors of city hall, but no one answered.

“I think this is outrageous,” Sergei Bukharov, a former Moscow parliament press officer told The Associated Press outside city hall. “And what they say at the election commission, how they explain why they don’t admit independent candidates, it’s all lies. Those signatures are real.”

Opposition activist Sobol, who also is fighting to be on the September ballot, urged protesters to continue down the street to the election commission.

“They are stealing our elections. They are stealing our future,” Sobol alleged, going on to accuse Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of ordering the rejection of the signatures.

The march began fading out after three hours, though a few hundred protesters remained outside the election commission as of 7 p.m. Moscow time (GMT 16:00.)

An election commission spokesman told Yashin that chief Valentin Gorbunov would not meet with the demonstrators Sunday since he was spending the weekend at his cottage outside the city, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reported.

About 30 said they would stage a sit-in overnight in the courtyard of the commission’s offices. Moscow police intervened a little over an hour later, dispersing the holdouts and arresting Yashin, Sobol, and several other opposition candidates.

As of 9 p.m. Moscow time (GMT 18:00), at least 38 protesters had been detained, according to arrest monitoring group OVD-Info.

Yashin tweeted from the back of a police van that the demonstration had been brutally dispersed and that he was currently detained with at least 20 other people. </s> Police officers detain an opposition candidate and lawyer at the Foundation for Fighting Corruption Lyubov Sobol in the center of Moscow, Russia, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019.

Helmeted police in Moscow rounded up nearly 200 of demonstrators and at least one opposition leader Saturday in an effort to squelch an unauthorized march protesting the exclusion of independent candidates from fall city council elections.

On Pushkin Square, a gathering point not far from the Kremlin where the protest march was to begin, police waded into a scattered crowd standing in light rain and detained dozens.

Officers quickly detained Lyubov Sobol, an opposition figure and one of the candidate hopefuls, as she was heading to the rally. She was taken away in a police van.

At least 194 people were detained, the independent monitoring group OVD-info reported, according to the independent Moscow Times reports. Police said they had detained 30 people

At another square along the planned 2.5-mile protest route along Moscow's Boulevard ring, helmeted riot police linked arms and swept people away.

The protest was livestreamed on Russian independent websites.

Authorities had warned the unauthorized protest march through central Moscow Saturday would bring a strong police response.

The city prosecutor’s office on Friday issued a statement warning that the attempt would be “a direct violation of the law. Law enforcement agencies will be forced to take all necessary measures to curb provocations.”

It was the third Saturday in a row that demonstrators turned out to protest the exclusion of opposition candidates for election to the 45-seat Moscow city council, which is controlled by the pro-Kremlin United Russia.

Authorities have denied that the opposition-backed candidates were specifically excluded from the ballot, claiming that they failed to garner enough valid signatures. The opposition said the allegations were false.

Sergey Radchenko, a history professor, told Moscow Times city authorities fear Kremlin-backed candidates would lose in big numbers if independents were on the ballot in September.

"Russian regional elections last fall showed that the regime can lose even when it resorts to electoral fraud," he told the newspaper. "If seats are lost to the opposition — first at the local levels, then perhaps even at the national level — the Kremlin will be placed in an untenable situation."

Last week, at an unsanctioned protest outside the Moscow mayor's office, more than 1,000 demonstrators were violently detained by police. An independent organization that monitors arrests put the number of detained at 1,373.

The initial demonstration, which had been officially approved, was held farther out from central Moscow.

Days before last week's demonstration, opposition figure Alexei Navalny was jailed for calling the protest. Also detained in advance were other prominent opposition politicians, including Ilya Yashin, Dmitry G. Gudkov and Ivan Zhdanov.

Navalny, a longtime political foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was later taken from jail and hospitalized, prompting fears that he had been poisoned.

Russia's Sklifosovsky toxicology institute said "poisoning substances were not found" in Navalny's samples, according to Russian news agencies. Navalny's personal physician, Anastasia Vasilyeva, blasted the official denying, saying it was "completely absurd" because bedsheets and clothes were not tested, Deutsche Welle reported.

The 43-year-old Navalny has called Putin's United Russia party a place of "crooks and thieves" and has accused the president's system of "sucking the blood out of Russia," the BBC reports.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Moscow protest: Russian police detain about 200, arrest a rally leader </s> MOSCOW (AP) — Police have established a heavy presence at the Moscow mayor's office ahead of an expected protest rally and several opposition figures have been detained.

The unauthorized demonstration planned for later Saturday in Moscow aims to protest authorities' refusal to put several opposition members on the ballot for September's city council election. The decision to bar the candidates for allegedly insufficient signatures on nominating petitions sparked several days of demonstrations this month.

Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition activist, had called Saturday's protest, saying it would continue until the rejected candidates are allowed to run. Navalny was jailed for 30 days Wednesday for calling an unauthorized protest.

A top Navalny associate, Ivan Zhdanov, said Saturday on Twitter that he had been detained. Ilya Yashin, another leading opposition member, also has been detained. </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.
Several hundred people are detained by Russian police at unauthorized protests in Moscow. The protests occurred because several opposition candidates were disqualified from running in the upcoming Moscow City legislative election.