• Interview Historian José María Faraldo: "Navalny has never been a real alternative to Putin"

  • Demonstrations Russia slows down access to Twitter after clashing over 'illegal' demonstrations

The Russian police arrested on Saturday all the participants in an opposition forum,

about 200 people

, a new episode of repression ahead of the legislative elections in September.

"This is how all the participants of the forum of independent deputies are detained," the organization "Democrats United" said on Telegram, along with a video in which opponents are seen being transported in police vehicles.

Coming from all over the country, the participants had attended the forum organized in a hotel in the north of Moscow, to talk about the regional and local elections next September.

In the forum there were a large number of independent local deputies.

"Forty minutes after the start, the police filled the room.

All the deputies were arrested and taken to the police stations,

" opponent

Ilya Yashin

said on Facebook

, accompanying his message with a photo of him in a police van.

In their statement, the Moscow police reported that they had detained about 200 people, since the forum had been organized

"in violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules"

and that there were also "members of organizations engaged in undesirable activities on Russian territory. ".

This police operation, unprecedented in Russia, comes

in a context of strong hardening of power against the opposition

, in particular with the conviction in February of the main opponent of the Kremlin,

Alexei Navalny

.

The former mayor of

Ekaterimburo

,

Yevguéni Roizman

, or the opposition

Vladimir Kara-Murza

are among those arrested, as well as several journalists who covered the event.

"Their goal is to intimidate us"

Images published by the Russian media showed dozens of police vans parked in the snow in front of the hotel, while in a video released by a local MP,

Sergei Vlassov

, a police officer claimed that the act was "undesirable".

"Their aim is to intimidate us," complained

Andrei Pivovarov

, an official with the Open Russia organization, who spoke to AFP from a police station.

"The reason for the cancellation of the forum is clear: the authorities are afraid of any competition in the elections and intimidate their opponents," Navalny's team, currently in jail, said on Telegram.

"The rating of the United Russia (ruling party) is at its lowest level and winning the elections, even in a rigged way, becomes more difficult," he adds.

A law enacted in 2015 by President

Vladimir Putin

makes it possible to designate foreign organizations active in Russia as "undesirables."

Then they can be banned, even if it is an NGO, foundations or companies.

Navalny was arrested in January upon his return to the country, after several months of convalescence in Germany, where he was recovering from a poisoning incident for which he blamed the Russian authorities.

He was then

sentenced to two and a half years in prison

, and his imprisonment sparked large demonstrations to which the authorities responded with more than 11,000 arrests.

His arrest and subsequent conviction sparked new clashes with Western countries, and both Washington and the European Union imposed sanctions on senior Russian officials.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Russia

  • European Union

  • Germany

  • Vladimir Putin

MusicThe pianists, an army for the soul of the USSR, but without Jews or homosexuals

HistoryDrinker, womanizer and relentless: this is how Hitler was caught by the Soviet spy who inspired James Bond

Stéphane Courtois "Lenin was the inventor of totalitarianism, Stalin was only his diligent student"

See links of interest

  • Work calendar

  • FC Augsburg - Borussia Mönchengladbach

  • Atalanta - Spezia

  • Valencia Basket - Fenerbahce Istanbul

  • Real Madrid - Elche

  • Getafe - Atlético de Madrid