Protests erupted in over 60 Russian cities on Saturday to demand the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent foe.
Russian police arrested more than 850 protesters, some of whom took to the streets in temperatures as frigid as minus-50 Celsuis (minus-58 Fahrenheit).
In Moscow, about 5,000 demonstrators filled Pushkin Square in the city centre, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested.
The protests stretched across Russia’s vast territory, from the island city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk north of Japan and the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to minus-50 Celsius, to the Russia’s more populous European cities.
The range demonstrated how Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have built an extensive network of support despite official government repression and being routinely ignored by state media.
The OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests said at least 191 people were detained in Moscow on Saturday and more than 100 at another large demonstration in St. Petersburg. Overall, it said 863 people had been arrested by late afternoon in Moscow.
Navalny was arrested on Jan. 17 when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a severe nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin and which Russian authorities deny. Authorities say his stay in Germany violated terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 criminal conviction, while Navalny says the conviction was for made-up charges.
The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin’s government.
His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by letting him go free.
Navalny faces a court hearing in early February to determine whether his sentence in the criminal case for fraud and money-laundering — which Navalny says was politically motivated — is converted to 3 1/2 years behind bars.
Moscow police on Thursday arrested three top Navalny associates, two of whom were later jailed for periods of nine and 10 days.