It only took a few tens of minutes for the police to intervene.
Russian police on Saturday arrested all participants of a forum in Moscow to which opposition figures and dozens of local deputies were invited, further tightening of the authorities' screws in the run-up to parliamentary elections in September.
This police operation, unprecedented in Russia, comes a little over a month after the sentence to two and a half years in prison of Alexey Navalny, the main adversary of the Kremlin, and the thousands of arrests during the demonstrations of support having followed his arrest.
Police have raided the "Municipal Russia" forum in Moscow and detained its participants @IlyaYashin, @Galiamina, @VKaramurza, @Maxim_Reznik and others.
Video by @tvrain pic.twitter.com/nLOx9hvZGF
- Dmitri Gorelov (@dimagorelov) March 13, 2021
On Saturday, more than 150 participants from all over Russia - including a vast majority of independent local MPs - gathered in a hotel for a conference on future regional and local elections, at the initiative of a group supported by the oligarch in exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the Kremlin's pet peeves.
But when the forum, scheduled to last two days, had started about 40 minutes ago, the police entered the building and arrested all the participants, taking them into police vans parked in front of the hotel.
“The police have filled the room.
All the deputies were arrested and taken to the police stations ”, indicates on Facebook the opponent Ilia Iachine, accompanying his post with a photo of him in a police van.
Привет всем из автозака! Сегодня мы ещё раз увидели, что Кремль панически боится муниципалуидеатов увидели
Posted by Юлия Галямина on Saturday March 13, 2021
According to witnesses and videos broadcast by Russian media, the police accused the forum of being organized by an "undesirable" organization, according to the terms of a law promulgated in 2015 by Vladimir Putin.
In a statement, the Moscow police said they had arrested 200 people, assuring that the forum was organized "in violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules" and that "among the participants were members of organizations with undesirable activities on Russian territory ”.
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The former mayor of Ekaterinburg Yevguéni Roïzman or the opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza are among those arrested, as are several journalists who covered the forum.
"The authorities are afraid"
The forum - the first of its kind in Russia - was organized by the “United Democrats”, a project by Mikhail Khodorkovsky which aims to promote the election of independent deputies in local polls.
“Their objective is to intimidate us,” denounces Andrei Pivovarov, head of another Mikhail Khodorkovsky organization, Open Russia, and who was one of the organizers of the forum.
Since 2017, Open Russia has been one of the foreign organizations active in Russia considered “undesirable”, according to the controversial law passed in 2015. On Twitter, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was indignant at these arrests, deeming them “unconstitutional”.
‼ ️ 150 opposition activists detained in Moscow during the 'municipal delegates' forum.
The rights of the opposition to continue its political activity is a fundamental right and must be respected.
The detainees must be freed immediately.
Video by @brewerov https://t.co/wfYOIK64MF
- Khodorkovsky Center (@mbk_center) March 13, 2021
Alexeï Navalny's team for its part considered that the reasons for the cancellation of the forum were "clear": "the authorities are afraid of any competition during the elections and intimidate their opponents".
"The rating of the (ruling party) United Russia is at its lowest and winning the elections, even rigged, becomes more difficult," adds the opponent's team.
The legislative elections of September 2021 indeed come in a difficult context for the Kremlin, United Russia which has experienced unusual setbacks in recent years as economic stagnation feeds political discontent.
Alexeï Navalny was arrested in January on his return to the country, after several months of convalescence in Germany where he was recovering from a poisoning for which he accuses the Kremlin.
He was then sentenced to two and a half years in prison, while his incarceration sparked major protests to which the authorities responded with more than 11,000 arrests.