| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Russian protesters fear Putin resorting to force
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s opposition expressed concern on Tuesday that Vladimir Putin was resorting to old tactics to crush dissent after riot police detained hundreds of protesters challenging the legitimacy of his presidential election victory.
After three months of peaceful anti-Putin protests, police hauled away more than 500 people, including opposition leaders, who attended unsanctioned rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg on Monday or refused to go after a rally that had been permitted.
The police intervention sent a clear signal that Putin is losing patience with opponents demanding more democracy, openness and political reforms, and will crack down if they step out of line.
“Fear of his own people, the animal fear of losing power, and a reliance on the police baton – this is what we are seeing,” Boris Nemtsov, a liberal opposition leader, wrote in a blog.
Defeated presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov said in a Twitter message that he was outraged by the police action which he said “broke the tradition of the recent peaceful protest rallies in the country.”
But the restraint shown by most police, even as they bundled protesters into vans, also suggested that Putin is determined not to give his critics the chance to depict him as a dictator ready to suppress any challenge to his authority.
Police said they had acted in accordance with the law and Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, defended the intervention.
“The opposition action consisted of two parts, legal and illegal. In both cases, the police acted with the highest professionalism and acted legitimately and effectively, within the competence of the law,” he said.
Witnesses said that although some protesters were hurt, and one said her arm had been broken, officers seemed intent on avoiding casualties at the main protest on Moscow’s Pushkin Square, often the scene of Soviet-era dissident protests.
But reporters saw police using tougher tactics against a group which tried to protest at Lubyanka Square, in front of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-protesters…DQ-;_ylv=3
Read more at Ye Olde False Flag
Source:
