These might not look like huge numbers but they are for Russia, a country that has experienced intimidation of protesters and gradual tightening of protest laws for more than a decade. More than 2,000 people were detained by the police across the country. Some estimate that about 2,000 people came out to protest in Moscow, and 1,000 in St Petersburg by our estimates, these numbers are understated. The protests on the first day of the war seem to have been the most populous. Many regional activists announced protests at the same time in cities all across Russia. Litvinovich was soon detained by the police on her way out of her house. The same morning, a human rights activist, Marina Litvinovich, who supposedly should have become a Duma deputy in 2021 but was denied the mandate because of massive fraud, encouraged the citizens of Moscow to gather at Pushkin Square at a given time of the evening. It turns out that we were wrong.īy 2022, the mass opposition movement in Russia was pretty much destroyed, so there were not many influential political forces that called on the Russians to protest against the invasion, yet some public figures did that. Among those who would not welcome such an invasion, it was a common belief that Putin was merely bluffing by threatening the West with a full-scale war. Waking up in the next few hours, many Russian citizens were shocked when they found out what had just happened. On 24 February, at 5am Russia invaded Ukraine.
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