Russian riot police detained hundreds of protesters including their figurehead, Alexei Navalny, today at rallies challenging Vladimir Putin's victory in a presidential election.
Mr Putin, who secured almost 64 percent of the votes yesterday portrayed his return to the presidency as a triumph over opponents who were trying to usurp power, though international monitors said the vote was clearly skewed in his favour.
But opposition leaders said they drew 20,000 people into Moscow's Pushkin Square, the scene of dissident protests during Soviet times, to call for new elections and an opening up of the political system crafted by Mr Putin during his 12-year rule.
"They robbed us," Mr Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger, told the crowd before his detention. "We are the power," he said to chants of "Russia without Putin".
The atmosphere at the rally was jovial at first, but became tense when riot police in helmets moved in to disperse several thousand activists who stayed on the square. Encircling one group of protest leaders huddled in a fountain closed down for winter, black-helmeted riot police detained Mr Navalny (35) and others, marching them to waiting police vans.
Mr Navalny was released three hours later.
Opposition leaders said 500-1,000 people were arrested but police put the number at 250 and said 14,000 people had attended the rally. Thousands of Putin supporters staged rallies closer to the red walls of the Kremlin, singing songs, waving Russian flags and chanting his name.
At least a further 350 people were detained by riot police - about 300 at unsanctioned protests in the northern city of St Petersburg, Mr Putin's home town, and 50 at Moscow's Lubyanka Square, the seat of the Soviet-era KGB. Up to 3,000 people turned out in St Petersburg, witnesses said.
The US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said on Twitter that the arrests were troubling and that freedom of
assembly and speech were universal values.
Observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) identified violations including ballot-stuffing at one-third of the polling stations monitored by the democracy watchdog. The ballot "didn't meet important democratic standards," Tonino Picula from the OSCE's parliamentary assembly told reporters in Moscow.
"The point of an election is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia." Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who came in second place with about 17 per cent, refused to congratulate Mr Putin or recognize his election victory.
A tearful Mr Putin last night insisted he obtained a fair victory. "We won in an open and honest fight," he told backers hours after polls closed last night. "We showed that our people can easily distinguish between a desire for novelty and renewal from political provocations which have only one goal: to destroy Russian statehood and usurp power."
Reuters