About 500 people gathered in Moscow on Wednesday night to protest constitutional reforms passed this month allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin to remain in power through 2036, the Moscow Times reported.
Putin has ruled over Russia for more than 20 years as president or prime minister. Constitutional amendments approved in a controversial vote this month allow Putin the right to run for two more presidential terms, which could see him stay in power for 16 more years. Opposition activists dismissed the July 2 vote as illegitimate and called for Putin to step down in demonstrations this week on Sunday and Wednesday in the capital city of Moscow. Sunday’s protests focused more on the Kremlin’s barring of opposition candidates from the ballot for the country’s parliamentary election in September.
“About 500 demonstrators many of whom wore face masks branded with the word ‘no,’ chanted calls for Putin to resign and held up banners against the recent reforms,” Reuters reported of Wednesday night’s protests. “Police surrounded [demonstrators] and began making arrests late in the evening after participants started a march down one of the city’s main boulevards, with officers in riot gear forcefully rounding up protesters and placing them in vans.”
Police detained 142 people according to OVD-Info, a group that tracks arrests at political protests. “An [Agence France-Presse] AFP journalist was also briefly detained” while documenting Wednesday night’s protests, the Moscow Times reported, quoting an AFP account of the event.
“Up to a thousand people gathered for a similar event in the second city of St. Petersburg,” an AFP correspondent said, according to the report.
Russian officials said that Wednesday’s scheduled protest in Moscow “had not been sanctioned by authorities,” Reuters reports. Moscow has banned large gatherings due to coronavirus restrictions. “Even in normal times, protests of more than one person require the [Russian] authorities’ advance consent,” the news agency noted.
Earlier Wednesday, Yulia Galyamina, a Moscow city council member and anti-Putin activist, organized a gathering in Moscow’s central Pushkin Square “to collect signatures from hundreds of supporters against this month’s constitutional reforms, to contest them in court,” the AFP reported. Galyamina wrote on her Facebook page that she and her daughter were later detained during Wednesday night’s protests.
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