MOSCOW – Russian police today searched the Saint Petersburg offices of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny and detained his top aide Lyubov Sobol and spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh, his allies said, ahead of nationwide protests in his support.
The morning police raids came ahead of protests planned in more than 100 cities across Russia in support of Navalny, who is on a hunger strike to protest his lack of medical treatment in prison.
“Searches were carried out from the very morning,” his team in Saint Petersburg said on Twitter.
“They have already come for the office’s cameraman, several volunteers and activists.”
Sobol’s lawyer Vladimir Voronin said on Twitter that police had pulled her out of a taxi.
“According to her, she was detained by many uniformed officers,” he wrote.
He later said she was taken to a police station but was being kept in a police wagon.
Yarmysh retweeted her lawyer saying that she was “just detained at the entrance of her building”.
The independent monitor OVD-Info said that police had conducted searches and detained activists in at least 20 cities across the country.
The police raids also come hours ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual state of the nation address.
In the address, he hailed the ‘breakthrough’ provided by Russian coronavirus vaccines, adding that the country was aiming for herd immunity against the virus by the autumn.
Police issued warnings against joining the rallies in support of Navalny, saying they are illegal gatherings.
Nearly 200 protesters were detained at across the country, a monitor said.
Protests in Moscow and Saint Petersburg are set to take place in half-an-hour and crowds earlier in the day took to the streets in the Far East, the Urals and Siberia, chanting slogans critical of Putin.
Previously, more than 10,000 people were detained during demonstrations in support of the Kremlin critic in late January and early February.
The opposition figure was arrested on arrival in Russia in January from Germany, where he had spent months recovering from near fatal nerve toxin poisoning.
He is serving two-and-a-half years in a penal colony for violating parole terms on old fraud charges he says are politically motivated. – AFP, April 21, 2021
