Police have arrested more than 100 people who had taken to the streets to mark the 47th birthday of Russia's jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a protest-monitoring group says.
Mr Navalny — who has exposed official corruption and organised massive anti-Kremlin protests — was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Moscow after recovering in Germany from nerve-agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin.
Mr Navalny is serving a combined prison sentence of more than 11 years for fraud and contempt of court charges that he says have been made up to silence him.
He is also facing a new trial on extremism charges that could keep him in jail for three more decades.
On Sunday, Mr Navalny's associates called for demonstrations in support of the opposition leader.
Risking jail themselves, some of Mr Navalny's supporters marked his birthday by holding individual demonstrations, while others painted graffiti.
At least 109 people were detained across 23 cities, according to the OVD-Info group that monitors political arrests.
Authorities have clamped down heavily on signs of dissent since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Footage from Moscow and St Petersburg — Russia's two largest cities — showed police arresting individual demonstrators.
One man could be seen briefly holding up a sign before Moscow police ushered him away, bent over, as he groaned in pain.
Another man, who held up a sign in English that read "Free Navalny" was also arrested in Moscow.
In St Petersburg, a woman accompanied by a child told reporters: "I'm against the war. That's why they detained me with my underage kid."
Mr Navalny said in a social media post on Sunday that he saw his prison term "just as an unpleasant part of my favourite job" and he thanked his supporters.
"My plan for the previous year was not to grow brutal and embittered and not to lose the nonchalance of behaviour — this is where defeat begins," he said.
Mr Navalny added he would have preferred to mark his birthday with a family breakfast, kisses from his children and gifts, but "life is such that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay for the right to have beliefs".
"The more there are such people, the smaller the price each has to pay," he said.
"And a day will certainly come when it will be routine and not dangerous at all to tell the truth and stand for justice in Russia."
Reuters/AP/ABC
