Moscow Police Crack Down on Anti-Putin Protests; Opposition Leaders Detained
Police in Russia have arrested dozens of protesters, including three opposition leaders, after forcibly breaking up a rally in central Moscow protesting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s election to a third term as the country’s president.
Television and user-generated video footage showed OMON riot police moving into the square to detain or brutally eject at least 200 of protesters who remained past the scheduled conclusion of the sanctioned rally.
Opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov, Ilya Yashin, and Aleksei Navalny were reportedly among those detained.
Dozens of journalists gathered at the site were briefly detained or roughly removed from the square. Drivers passing by the site beeped their horns noisily to protest the heavy-handed tactics of the OMON forces.
A number of protesters were seen being dragged from the protest site with their arms pinned behind their heads, an OMON officer on either side.
The crackdown comes after as many as 20,000 Russians gathered in central Pushkin Square to call for fresh elections to replace the March 4 polls, which handed Putin a sweeping victory with almost 64 percent of the vote.