Anti-Kremlin protests rock Russia's once sleepy hinterland
Tens of thousand people have been rallying on the streets of the regional capital of Russia’s Far East since Saturday to protest the arrest of opposition governor Sergei Furgal and voice a general frustration with Moscow’s perceived heavy-handed tactics.
Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 people on the border with China and seven time zones away from Moscow, erupted in protest on Saturday when an estimated 30,000 people took to the streets chanting “Free Furgal!” and “Putin, resign!”
Local media have described the rally as the largest in the city’s history.
Protests persisted on Sunday and Monday when hundreds of angry residents came out in defiance of an explicit ban on public gatherings.
Khabarovsk's local government on Monday broke the silence on the weekend of peaceful protests, warning citizens against rioting
“We cannot allow mass unrest and clashes with law enforcement,” the government said in a statement on Monday. “If you stand against lawlessness, don’t break the law!”
About a thousand people gathered on Monday evening in central Khabarovsk and marched through the streets, chanting “Bring Furgal home!” and “Furgal is our choice!”
“I’ve never seen that many people in my living memory,” Alexei Vorsin, a local activist aligned with opposition politician Alexei Navalny, told the Telegraph on Monday.
With Mr Furgal beating the Kremlin candidate in 2018 “people felt there was a chance for change, and it’s all been destroyed.”
Alexei Izotov, a Khabarovsk businessman who is moving to western Russia this autumn, says the protests are channeling long-harboured frustrations with Moscow.
“The region is in disarray,” he told the Telegraph.
“Everything that’s being said on TV about development and big projects is just fiction. People in the region feel both geographically and financially cut off from the rest of Russia.”
Last week’s arrest of Mr Furgal who was filmed being strong-armed and handcuffed by FSB secret agents in broad daylight and flown to Moscow for questioning has rattled Khabarovsk which overwhelmingly voted for the opposition politician in 2018.
Mr Furgal’s prosecution on charges of organising two contract killings 15 years ago has been widely seen as a payback for his landslide win over the pro-Kremlin candidate as well as his apparent unwillingness to rig the results of the 1 July vote that handed Vladimir Putin a mandate to rule Russia at least until 2036.
Khabarovsk was one of the few regions that delivered an extremely low turnout and a shaky victory for the constitutional amendments that allow Mr Putin to run for office again
Yuri Trutnev, the presidential envoy in the Far East, on Monday arrived in Khabarovsk where he publicly berated local officials for “bad work” and insisted that the intelligence agents would not have charged Mr Furgal “unless they had 100 percent solid grounds for it.”
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, head of Mr Furgal’s LDPR party, told the Ekho Moskvy radio station on Monday that Kremlin officials including Mr Trutnev have been “pressuring him for two years and standing in the way of his work.”
“They’ve been trying to get him to step down on good terms, not to rough him up,” he said.
Mr Trutnev in televised remarks on Monday denied accusations of putting pressure on Mr Furgal for his anti-Kremlin stance.
Russian secret services last week unleashed what has been described as a fresh wave of political repressions, raiding homes of several opposition activists and arresting prominent defence reporter Ivan Safronov who quit journalism just two months earlier.
Mr Safronov was formally charged with treason on Monday. His defence lawyer says it is still unclear what exactly he is being accused of.
Two dozen journalists rallying in Mr Safronov's support were detained on Monday for protesting in his support outside a Moscow prison.
