(Bloomberg) — Russian police detained more than 300 people, including opposition leaders, during unsanctioned Moscow protests against the authorities’ decision to ban anti-Kremlin candidates from running for the city council next month, according to independent legal-aid group OVD-Info.
Lyubov Sobol, who works for the Anti-Corruption Fund run by opposition politician Alexey Navalny, was detained as she was getting into a taxi to the rally, as broadcast live by the online TV channel Dozhd. Sobol has been on a hunger strike for three weeks over the rejection of her candidacy.
The Moscow police unit estimated that about 350 people participated in the “unsanctioned events,” as of 2:30 p.m. local time, with 30 detained, according a statement on the unit’s website. The authorities have not updated their estimates of the detained so far. The 381 figure from OVD-Info was released at 5 p.m.
The rallies that come amid a growing sense of pessimism among Russia’s population. President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings are at the lowest since 2013 after five years of falling living standards.
As the Moscow protests were escalating, Russia’s Investigative Committee on Saturday opened a criminal case, alleging that Navalny’s Anti-Corruption fund was part of a money-laundering scheme.
Unnamed employees of the fund and people close to it received about 1 billion rubles ($15.4 million) in cash and foreign currency from third parties in 2016-2018, transferred the money into bank accounts and then into the fund, the investigators said in a statement on the Committee website.
The Committee plans to “identify the sources of the illegally received money, and all the participants of the illegal scheme to finance the fund,” according to the statement.
Earlier this week, the investigators opened a separate criminal case into the protests, calling them “mass unrests” and leaving participants vulnerable to sentences of up to eight years in prison and organizers facing as long as 15 years.
As a small concession, on Tuesday the Moscow electoral commission agreed to review the application of one rejected candidate, Sergei Mitrokhin, who represents the liberal Yabloko party.
(Updates with Investigative Committee’s statement on money laundering in sixth, seventh paragraphs.)
–With assistance from Henry Meyer.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dina Khrennikova in Moscow at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Herron at [email protected], James Amott
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.