Russia has been hit by the largest civil protest since Putin invaded Ukraine, as 10,000 people took to the streets and violent clashes broke out over the jailing of an anti-war activist.
Riot police and protesters were involved in clashes and several ‘injured people’ were reported at the protest in the small town of Baymak, Bashkortostan, a rural region of Russia near the Ural Mountains.
The protest was sparked by the imprisonment of a prominent anti-war activist, who was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘incitement to hatred’.
Photos and videos taken during the protests show demonstrators throwing snowballs and chunks of ice, and police responding similarly with tear gas canisters.
About 300 special forces soldiers were brought in after law enforcement failed to control the baying crowd, and the Russian National Guard was expected to send backup troops to help.
A witness said: ‘They beat the men mercilessly. They hit them on their heads and backs with clubs. They say someone’s eye got knocked out.’
The reason was the imprisonment of 37-year-old anti-war activist Fail Alsyonov, who was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘incitement to hatred’.
Paddy wagons were deployed to detain the perpetrators of the riot. At one point, the angry crowd surrounded and trapped Putin’s security forces.
They appeared to hold them hostage and threatened to harm the officers if protesters were injured.
An imam was deployed by the security forces to restore peace in the mainly Muslim region.
“His speech had no effect,” one report said.
According to reports, ‘negotiations’ were underway between the two sides.
The scenes showed the worst incident of civil war in Russia since the conflict with Ukraine began in February 2022.
The trigger was the imprisonment of 37-year-old anti-war activist Fail Alsyonov, who was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘incitement to hatred’ after a verdict behind closed doors.
The head of the republic, Radiy Khabirov, had accused him of insulting people from Central Asia and the Caucasus in a speech in the Bashkir language that Alsynov insists was mistranslated.
The activist has also been publicly critical of Moscow’s large-scale offensive in Ukraine.
According to local media, Alsynov was fined last year for criticizing Russia’s mobilization drive for the conflict in Ukraine, calling it a “genocide of the Bashkir people” in a social media post and saying that Moscow’s offensive “was not our war”.
Alsyonov has also been severely critical of gold mining projects in the region, an important source of revenue for Russia at a time when the Russian economy has suffered from sanctions imposed by the Western world in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov emphasized the importance of the unrest, claiming it was alarming for the Kremlin dictator.
‘This does not mean that the regime there has now been overthrown, but it does mean that the authorities will have to act very harshly in suppressing discontent, and this in turn means that many painful grievances will be stored in the treasury. of the memory of the people,” he said.
‘This means that at a time when things are going very badly for the regime, the burden of claims that the people will receive and make may prove to be completely unbearable.
‘This is how the Soviet Union collapsed…’ Riot police and protesters were involved in clashes and several ‘injured people’ were reported at protests in the small town of Baymak, Bashkortostan
Photos and videos taken during the protests showed demonstrators throwing snowballs and chunks of ice, and police responding similarly with tear gas canisters.
‘The authorities are now placing a bomb under the foundations of Russia themselves.
“Not the CIA, but the current ‘patriotic’ authorities.”
Russia has suppressed dissent as troops fight in Ukraine. Amnesty International reported last year that 21,000 anti-war activists suffered severe reprisals for speaking out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Amnesty International’s Russia researcher Oleg Kozlovsky said at the time: ‘Repression in Russia runs deep, with a complex and extensive range of tactics increasingly being weaponized to silence anti-war dissidents.
“Peaceful protesters against the war in Ukraine and those who share critical information about the Russian armed forces face serious criminal, administrative and other sanctions.
“New, absurd laws that criminalize those who freely express their opinions have been passed and immediately put into use.
“The flawed criminal justice system, characterized by grossly unfair trials, has been used to hand out prison sentences and large fines to silence critics in response to the slightest dissent.”
