Regardless of the specter of yearslong jail phrases, hundreds of Russians joined antiwar rallies throughout the nation on Sunday in a placing present of the pent-up anger in Russian society about President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The police reported greater than 3,000 arrests throughout the nation — the best nationwide whole formally reported in any single day of protest in latest reminiscence. An activist group that tracks arrests, OVD-Data, reported detentions in 49 totally different Russian cities.
Video from impartial Russian information retailers masking the protests confirmed throngs of individuals chanting “No to conflict!” on St. Petersburg’s central avenue, Nevsky Prospekt, and on Moscow’s Manezhnaya Sq., simply exterior the Kremlin partitions.
Within the metropolis of Kaliningrad close to the Baltic Sea, a girl protesting the conflict 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 conflict in Ukraine, earlier than calling over different policemen and telling them: “Arrest all of them.”
The hundreds of Russians who protested on Sunday represented solely a slice of these livid over the invasion. Hundreds extra fled the nation within the final 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 all Russia’s best-known movie critics, wrote on Sunday, saying his departure. “We’re struggling a disaster — no, not an financial or political one. It is a ethical disaster.”