The NGO Human Rights Watch denounces the “extreme brutality” of the Police during the arrests while the UN calls for their release
The world rises up against Putin. Despite having the largest Army on the planet, the Russian president has been left alone. The international community has jumped on him after his troops launched the military offensive in Ukraine. As politicians engage in talks at the highest level to sanction Moscow, citizens take to the streets to denounce the invasion, branding Putin a “crazy”, “murderer” and “dictator”. The Russians themselves have turned against his president. Thousands of people have protested during these days, since the beginning of the attack on Ukrainian territory, and raised their voices in sixty Russian cities – such as Moscow, Saint Petersburg or Krasnodar, among others – for an end to the “madness” of the war, which has already left hundreds dead and more than 100,000 displaced.
Freedom in the former Soviet country is far from that in other states. And it is that Russia has a severe legislation to control demonstrations that usually end with massive arrests. At the moment, those arrested reach almost a whopping 3,000 –the majority in the capital–, including journalists, during the first days of demonstrations. The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, pointed out that the detainees “had no right to organize actions to express their point of view” and insisted that “events” with the participation “of a certain number of people, are simply not allowed by law. ».
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday denounced the thousands of arbitrary arrests carried out by the Russian Police, some of them with “extreme brutality”, against their own citizens. In this sense, he verified thirty videos published on social networks about the concentrations in Saint Petersburg and Moscow whose images show at least four incidents of police brutality where the agents “beat, strangle and drag” the participants on the ground.
On the other hand, the NGO has criticized the “censorship” of the Russian government, which has ordered ten independent portals to remove information on civilian casualties and attacks on cities in Ukraine, under threat of blocking in case of non-compliance.
Without “enough jails”
The Belgian Prime Minister, the liberal Alexander de Croo, warned the Russian president that there will not be “enough prisons” to silence the thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets to show their rejection of the Russian military offensive. “Putin will not have enough prisons if he wants to silence everyone who is asking for peace and longing for freedom,” he wrote on Twitter.
The UN, for its part, has demanded that Russia release the thousands of detainees “arbitrarily” during the protests and has stressed that “arresting people for exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly is an arbitrary deprivation of freedom”.
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