MOSCOW — Hundreds of people were detained across Russia on Saturday as police used force to break up rallies in cities across the country where protesters demanded the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
Navalny's wife Yulia said on social media she had been detained at a rally in central Moscow which was attended by at least 40,000 people, according to an estimate by Reuters reporters.
Her husband had called on his supporters to protest after being arrested last weekend as he returned to Russia from Germany after being poisoned with a nerve agent, he says was applied to his underpants by state security agents in August.
The authorities had warned people to stay away from Saturday's protests, saying they risked catching the coronavirus as well as prosecution and possible jail time for attending an unauthorized event.
Police were seen roughly detaining people, bundling them into nearby vans.
But protesters defied the ban and bitter cold, and turned out in force. Some chanted "Putin is a thief", and "Disgrace" and "Freedom to Navalny!"
Some of Navalny's political allies were detained in the days leading up to the protests.
The OVD-Info protest monitor group said that at least 1,090 people, including 300 in Moscow and 162 in St Petersburg, had been detained across Russia, a number likely to rise. It reported arrests at rallies in nearly 70 towns and cities.
Navalny, a 44-year-old lawyer, is in a Moscow prison pending the outcome of four legal matters he describes as trumped up. He accuses President Vladimir Putin of ordering his attempted murder. Putin has dismissed that, alleging Navalny is part of a U.S.-backed dirty tricks campaign to discredit him.
One Moscow protester, Sergei Radchenko, 53, said: "I'm tired of being afraid. I haven't just turned up for myself and Navalny, but for my son because there is no future in this country."
There was no immediate comment from the Kremlin, which had previously called the protests illegal and the work of "provocateurs."
Video footage from the Russian far east showed riot police in Vladivostok chasing a group of protesters down the street, while demonstrators in Khabarovsk, braving temperatures of around -14 Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), chanted "Bandits!"
Police in Siberia's Yakutsk on Saturday, grabbed a protester by his arms and legs and dragged him into a van, video footage showed.
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Opposition politician Dmitry Gudkov said the scale of the protests in the regions was unusual.
"Everyone must be really fed up with the stealing and lies if the regions have risen up like this," he wrote on Twitter.
Mobile phone and internet services suffered outages on Saturday, the monitoring site downdetector.ru showed, a tactic sometimes used by authorities to make it harder for protesters to communicate and share video footage online.
In a push to galvanize support ahead of the protests, Navalny's team released a video about an opulent palace on the Black Sea they alleged belonged to Putin, something the Kremlin denied. As of Saturday the clip had been viewed more than 68 million times.
Navalny's allies hope to tap into what polls say are pent-up frustrations among the public over years of falling wages and economic fallout from the pandemic.
But Putin's grip on power looks unassailable for now and the 68-year-old president regularly records an approval rating of over 60 percent, much higher than that of Navalny.
The U.S. Embassy published the locations and times of the protests, telling Americans to stay away. Russia's foreign ministry called this a "gross interference" in the country's domestic affairs.
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Hundreds detained as protests called by Putin foe Navalny erupt across Russia - NBC News
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