More than 400 people were arrested in Russia over the weekend while paying tribute to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic prison, a human rights group reported.
The sudden death of Navalny, aged 47, was a blow to many Russians, who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest enemy. Even after surviving nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison sentences, Navalny did not stop criticizing the Kremlin.
The news reverberated around the world, and hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities paid tribute to him with flowers and candles on Friday and Saturday at the site of what looked like monuments to the victims of political repression. .
In more than a dozen cities, police arrested 401 people on Saturday, according to the rights group OVD-Info which tracks political arrests and provides legal aid.
More than 200 people were arrested in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the group said. Among the detainees was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church — a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church — who announced on social media his intention to hold a memorial service for Navalny. The priest was arrested Saturday morning in front of his home. He was accused of organizing a rally and placed in a holding cell at a police station, but was later hospitalized with a stroke, OVD-Info reported.
St. Petersburg courts ordered 42 people detained Friday to serve one to six days in jail, while nine others were fined, court officials said Saturday evening.
In Moscow, at least six people were sentenced to 15 days in prison, according to OVD-Info. One person was also jailed in the southern city of Krasnodar and two others in the city of Bryansk, the group said.
PHOTO ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A police officer monitors the area surrounding the memorial dedicated to victims of political repression where people lay flowers paying their last respects to Alexei Navalny on February 18 in Moscow.
News of Navalny’s death comes a month before Russia’s presidential election that is widely expected to give President Vladimir Putin six more years in power.
Questions about the cause of Navalny’s death persisted Sunday, and it was unclear when authorities would release his body to his family.
Alexei Navalny’s team said on Saturday that he was “murdered” and accused the authorities of deliberately delaying the release of his remains to his family.
Navalny had been imprisoned since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. He has been sentenced to three prison terms since his arrest, on a number of charges which he has denied on political grounds.
After the latest verdict which imposed 19 years in prison on him, Alexeï Navalny said he understood that he was serving “a life sentence, which is measured by the length of his life or the lifespan of this regime”.
Hours after his death, his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, made a surprise appearance at the Security Conference in Munich, Germany.