Hundreds of Russians took to the streets to protest the war in Ukraine, defying a year of heavy police crackdown on any anti-Kremlin demonstration. The state violence monitor OVD-Info pointed to more than 1,540 prisoners in 52 cities by the beginning of the night (afternoon in Brazil).
One of the winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, Russian Dmitri Mutarov harshly criticized Vladimir Putin’s military action in Ukraine and called on the population to protest against the war.
The movement started timidly. In the few episodes where someone tried to put up posters about the conflict in Moscow, the police were present. On the allegation that every demonstration in Russia needs municipal authorization, which is required by law, protesters were detained.
This is what happened to Irina, a woman who tried to protest in front of the statue of the poet Alexander Pushkin. She held up a sign and was arrested.
There were similar episodes scattered around the city, which has become unaccustomed to large acts since Putin ordered a strong crackdown on acts against the arrest of activist Alexei Navalni, in 2021. Slowly, however, the movement gained strength, taking hundreds to the same square as the poet’s statue. at the beginning of the night.
Muratov is an especially qualified critic. Despite running the country’s last independent print newspaper, Novaia Gazeta (new newspaper, in Russian), which has seen his reporters killed in suspicious conditions while investigating government affairs (Anna Politkovksaia in 2006 being the most notorious), he has transit among the country’s political elite.
Rumor has it that he is even heard by Putin, who likes to keep the idea of ​​some residual pluralism within the power scheme he commands.​
“What will be the next step? A nuclear salvo?”, he asked, in a video recorded for Radio Eco in Moscow. “The next edition of Novaia Gazeta will be launched bilingually because we never saw Ukraine as the enemy and Ukrainian as the language of the enemy,” she said. The newspaper has 90,000 copies and runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Whether he can do that remains to be seen. Muratov also said that he is ashamed and saddened by the war, and that “only a Russian anti-war movement can save life on this planet, in my opinion”.
Muratov shared the Nobel Peace Prize with another journalist fighting government oppression, Filipina Maria Ressa.
