A political forum in which several opposition groups participated came to a halt on Saturday in Moscow. The police intervened and arrested all its participants, including Russian political figures, according to the organizer of this meeting, United Democrats. “This is how all participants in the Forum of Independent Deputies are detained,” this organization said on Telegram, posting a video of opponents being taken in police vans.
About 150 people – the vast majority of them local deputies – from all over Russia attended the forum, held in a hotel in northern Moscow, the aim of which was to discuss regional and local elections scheduled for September. “Forty minutes after the start of the forum, the police filled the room. All the deputies were arrested and taken to the police stations, ”said opponent Ilya Iachine on Facebook, accompanying his post with a photo of him in a police van.
An “adverse event”?
Images released by Russian media showed dozens of police vans parked in the snow outside the hotel, while in a video posted by Moscow neighborhood deputy Sergei Vlassov a police officer claimed that this “event is unwanted. “. The former mayor of Yekaterinburg Yevgeny Roïzman and the opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza are among those arrested, as are several journalists who covered the forum.
“The police said the event was organized by an undesirable organization,” Russian opposition organization Open Russia told Interfax news agency. United Democrats, organizer of the forum, is like Open Russia a project of the oligarch in exile Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the pet peeves of the Kremlin. “The reason for the cancellation of the forum is clear: the authorities are afraid of any competition during the elections and intimidate their opponents”, reacted on Telegram the team of the main Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny, currently imprisoned.
“The rating of the (ruling party) United Russia is at its lowest and winning the elections, even rigged, becomes more difficult”, adds the text. A law promulgated in 2015 by Vladimir Poutine makes it possible to designate foreign organizations active in Russia as “undesirable”. They can then be banned, whether they are NGOs, foundations or companies.
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