Thousands of people have been arrested at protests across Russia against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s interior ministry said more than 3,500 people had been arrested: 1,700 in Moscow, 750 in St Petersburg and 1,061 in other cities. The ministry said 5,200 people had taken part in the protests.
The OVD-Info protest monitoring group said it had documented the arrest of at least 4,366 people in 56 cities.
The last Russian protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of opposition leader Alexey Navalny after he was arrested on returning from Germany where he had been recovering from nerve agent poisoning.
Some Russian state-controlled media carried short reports about Sunday’s protests but they did not feature prominently in news bulletins.
Russia’s RIA news agency said the Manezhnaya Square in Moscow, adjoining the Kremlin, had been “liberated” by police, who had arrested some participants of an unsanctioned protest against the military operation in Ukraine.
