Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 13 – Last night and this
morning after the end of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit, Vladimir
Putin ordered the arrest of nine opposition figures across the country, “from
Nakhodka to Samara,” Rusmonitor reports (rusmonitor.com/aresty-oppozicii-olga-kurnosova-aresty-oppozicionerov-sankcioniroval-lichno-putin.html).
Ilya Ponomaryev, a longtime Russian
human rights activist, told the news agency that these arrests were the Kremlin’s
response to the success of the March 26 actions and that their timing reflected
both Putin’s statement yesterday after fighting “color revolutions” and his
desire not to have them become the subject of US-Russian conversations.
Olga Kurnosova, writing in
Rusmonitor, says she completely agrees with Ponomaryev that the nine arrests
are not only the result of a personal decision by Putin but are worrisome
because activists don’t have details on where those detained are being kept and
fear they may be charged with “an attempted coup” for their organization of the
March demonstrations.
In addition to these arrests, there
have been a wave of searches of the apartments of opposition figures (http://rusmonitor.com/obyski-u-oppozicii-po-vsejj-rossii-obyski-i-aresty-liderov-protesta.html).
Not all have been formally arrested, but some have been detained for some time
on increasingly flimsy pretexts.
That pattern was highlighted
yesterday when the Russian police detained a group of activists for reading
aloud on Red Square the Russian Constitution, yet another document for which
Putin has routinely shown his contempt (ovdinfo.org/express-news/2017/04/12/na-krasnoy-ploshchadi-nachalis-zaderzhaniya-uchastnikov-chteniya-konstitucii).
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