Police in Russia detain over 4,300 more anti-war protesters

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More than 4,300 detained at anti-war protests in Russia

STORY: Police detained more than 4,300 people across Russia on Sunday at protests against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.That’s according to an independent protest monitoring group, which said it had documented the detention of at least 4,366 people in 56 different cities across the country.Video obtained by Reuters showed dozens of protesters in Yekaterinburg being detained on Sunday, and one protester there was shown being beaten with a baton and kicked on the ground by police in riot gear.The video showed numerous protesters, some elderly, being escorted onto buses by security forces.Russia’s interior ministry said earlier that police had detained around 3,500 people, including 1,700 in Moscow, 750 in St. Petersburg and 1,061 in other cities.The interior ministry said 5,200 people had taken part in the protests. Some Russian state-controlled media carried short reports about Sunday’s protests but they did not feature high in news bulletins. The last Russian protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he was arrested upon returning from Germany where he had been recovering from being poisoned with a nerve agent.Navalny had called for anti-war protests on Sunday across Russia and the rest of the world. Protesters gathered at Parliament Square in London on Sunday, and outside the White House in Washington D.C., as well as in Mexico City, New Delhi, Istanbul, Budapest, Belgrade and Brussels.And residents of some Ukrainian towns and cities occupied by Russian forces also took to the streets in protest.