Ahead of the 9/9 rallies, the Kremlin has clearly decided to try out a new tactic: preemptively detaining all well-known opposition figures so they cannot take part in the protest. Two weeks ago, Alexei Navalny was detained, supposedly over the march on January 28. The police explained it by saying they had been unable to find Alexei in Moscow for six months, and then—what luck!—they suddenly found him right before the new rally.
On the eve of the protest, police detained Moscow campaign office staffer Nikolai Kasyan, ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) employee Georgy Alburov, and economist and Navalny LIVE host Vladimir Milov. The next day, they detained other Navalny associates: Dmitry Nizovtsev, Nikolai Lyaskin, Ruslan Shaveddinov, Oleg Stepanov, and even Lyubov Sobol. Under the law, she cannot be held for more than three hours at all—Lyuba has a small child—but that did not stop police from keeping her at the police station for 14 hours.
The same thing happened in the regions. The police were specifically targeting Navalny campaign staff. As of yesterday, 26 out of 46 coordinators had been detained.
The Russian authorities are doing everything they can to obstruct the rallies, and to that end they are constantly testing society’s reaction. At first, they came up with absurd laws and wildly disproportionate punishments, but that did not stop anyone. Now they have gone even further—they are ready to detain people who, even by their own standards, have not yet done anything. Literally snatching them from outside their apartment buildings—and, most importantly, doing it in advance, as if the police already know these people will later commit an “offense.” It is like something out of a dystopia.
Do not let them intimidate you. The reason for all these experiments is that Putin is terribly afraid of protests. If we want to achieve our goals, the only reliable way to do it is to keep taking to the streets.
