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Regardless of the specter of yearslong jail phrases, hundreds of Russians joined antiwar rallies throughout the nation on Sunday in a placing present of the pent-up anger in Russian society about President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The police reported greater than 3,000 arrests throughout the nation — the best nationwide whole formally reported in any single day of protest in latest reminiscence. An activist group that tracks arrests, OVD-Information, reported detentions in 49 completely different Russian cities.
Video from unbiased Russian information shops masking the protests confirmed throngs of individuals chanting “No to conflict!” on St. Petersburg’s central avenue, Nevsky Prospekt, and on Moscow’s Manezhnaya Sq., simply outdoors the Kremlin partitions. Different clips confirmed protesters being crushed and kicked by the police, including subsequent to a stand of balloons and present packing containers inside Moscow’s storied kids’s division retailer, Detsky Mir — subsequent door to the headquarters of the home intelligence company, the F.S.B.
Within the metropolis of Kaliningrad close to the Baltic Sea, a lady protesting the conflict was recorded in a video posted on Twitter telling a police officer that she had survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
“Are you right here to help the fascists?” the officer responded, repeating the Kremlin narrative concerning the conflict in Ukraine, earlier than calling over different policemen and telling them: “Arrest all of them.”
The hundreds of Russians who protested on Sunday represented solely a slice of these livid over the invasion. Hundreds extra fled the nation within the final 10 days, as their financial savings evaporated amid the collapse of the ruble and the West’s crushing sanctions.
“There isn’t any extra Russia,” Anton Dolin, one in all Russia’s best-known movie critics, wrote on Sunday, saying his departure. “We’re struggling a disaster — no, not an financial or political one. This can be a ethical disaster.”
In a telephone interview from Latvia, Mr. Dolan, 46, described how he spent 4 hours within the chilly ready to cross the border on foot Saturday along with his spouse, two kids, their canine and some suitcases.
“Now we have realized we’re likely departing for a very long time,” he mentioned. “We by no means ready for this departure and by no means in our lives even thought we might ever go away Russia.”
Mr. Putin remained defiant, regardless of telephone calls with the presidents of France and Turkey on Sunday during which each leaders urged Russia to contemplate a cease-fire.
“An finish to the particular operation is simply potential if Kyiv stops its army motion and fulfills Russia’s well-known calls for,” the Kremlin mentioned.
By Sunday, the Russian authorities had blocked entry contained in the nation to the web sites of nearly all widespread unbiased media shops reporting on the conflict. Mr. Putin on Friday signed a legislation punishing “false information” concerning the conflict with jail sentences of as much as 15 years.
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