340 mourners detained in Russia at events in memory of opposition leader Navalny

At least 340 people have been detained at events across 30 Russian cities since the death of Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most formidable domestic opponent, according to rights group OVD-Info.
It is the largest wave of arrests at political events in Russia since Sept.2022, when more than 1,300 were arrested at demonstrations against a “partial mobilisation” of reservists for the military campaign in Ukraine.

Navalny, a 47-year-old former lawyer, fell unconscious and died on Friday after a walk at the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony where he was serving a three-decade sentence, the prison service said.

OVD-Info, which reports on freedom of assembly in Russia, said the largest numbers of arrests on Saturday occurred in St Petersburg and Moscow, where Navalny’s movement had traditionally been strong, with 74 and 49 detained, respectively, as of 1409 GMT.


OVD-Info also reported individual arrests in smaller cities across Russia, from the border city of Belgorod, where seven were killed in a Ukrainian missile strike on Thursday, to Vorkuta, an Arctic mining outpost once a centre of the Stalin-era gulag labour camps.


“In each police department there may be more detainees than in the published lists,” OVD-Info said. “We publish only the names of those people about whom we have reliable knowledge and whose names we can publish.”