Russian Election Protests

[Imp]

Police said there were at least 25,000 at the Moscow demonstration, while protest organisers claimed 60-80,000.

In reality, more likely 30-40 thousand ..

The thing is, though, these protesters are mainly supporters of the Communist Party as far as I know, so they are less pro-Western than Putin. So all in all, I don't think this is such a bad idea. The consequences may actually be good, if the ruling party is weakened. It's not as if Putin has ever really been strong on the West, anyway.

There were communists, liberals and nationalists... I voted for communists, but i will not participate in demonstrations together with the liberals and nationalists.

[HEAVEN]

Russian needs to bring back the might of the soviet union. We need a superpower like them to counter the usa.

[Kermanshahan]

Among the tens of thousands of people happily enduring the freezing temperatures in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square is Alexey, an international lawyer. He tells me he's never protested before.
"I'm not a political person," says Alexey, who asked his full name not be used. "I'm just a simple Russian citizen."
Alexey says the day after Russia's parliamentary elections he asked his friends and colleagues who they voted for. Not one said United Russia. "It was some kind of astonishment for me to understand how a party for whom nobody voted could win the elections," he says.
It was enough to inspire Alexey to protest. His story is not unique. Police estimate 25,000 people gathered in Moscow; protest organizers told the crowd they thought some 80,000 gathered.
There are many in the crowd who until recently chose apathy over politics. But the elections on December 4 changed them. The protesters are demanding an annulment of the election results - which saw Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party win 238 seats - and a new vote.
Protests erupt in Russia over elections Anti-Putin protesters rally in London Nude protests, large rally in Moscow Russian protests on social media sites
Writer Dmitry Glukhovsky says it was the first time he voted. The experience transformed him into another first time protester. "I decided to try to influence the destiny of my country. I came to the polling station, I cast the ballot and it's stolen," Glukhovsky says.
Another man in the crowd, Vyacheslav Zhmakin, vents similar feelings.
"I'm a little bit angry because they told me, 'give us free time to hear our positions' and so on. And then 'give us your free time to come and vote'. I see my country does not really need my vote," Zhmakin says.
"So you want new elections. Do you want anything else?" I ask.
"Me personally? No," he replies.
It's another point often repeated by the protesters -- they don't want a revolution. Tamara Mamedova and her friends laugh when I use the R-word. "We just want free elections. And that's all. We don't want revolution," Mamedova says. "We just want our rights back and that's all."
But the protest movement of this Russian winter does appear to have one thing in common with the Arab Spring. Social networks played a vital role in mobilizing these educated, middle class people to stand in the snow and demand political change.
"I think without the Internet, without Facebook and without Russian parallel social network services, this would not have been possible," Glukhovsky says.
Many in this crowd are politically inexperienced. None of them is naive. No one here believes this one gathering will convince Prime Minister Putin to annul the vote and hold new elections. But it has inspired hope and the protesters say that's a profound change.
"I feel one, a union, with all these people," Mamedova says. "I believe we can do something. Something really great that can change the whole political situation in Russia."

Moscow protesters want 'free elections, not revolution' - CNN.com

[Kermanshahan]

A weekend of protests in Russia has forced President Dmitry Medvedev to order an investigation into allegations of electoral fraud during last week's parliamentary vote. There hasn't been demonstrations like this in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Listen to audio here:

Russian Election Protests Biggest In 2 Decades : NPR

[Kermanshahan]

RUSSIAN Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spokesman says the results of contested parliamentary polls will stand despite massive street protests and a probe by the election authorities.

"Even if you add up all this so-called evidence, it accounts for just over 0.5 percent of the total number of votes," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"So even if hypothetically you recognise that they are being contested in court, then in any case, this can in no way affect the question of the vote's legitimacy or the overall results."

His comments followed an order from President Dmitry Medvedev for election officials to look into reports of vote-fixing after the ruling party's narrow victory sparked the largest protest rallies since the 1990s.

Saturday's historic demonstrations near the Kremlin saw more than 50,000 people deride the outcome of December 4 elections that were widely seen as a litmus test for Putin's planned return to the presidency next year.

The rallies have put Putin under the strongest political pressure he has faced in his dominant 12-year rule and suggested that his path back to the Kremlin in March elections may be thornier than originally thought.

Putin himself stayed out of the public spotlight over the weekend and was scheduled today to officially launch a new reactor at a nuclear power station in the central Russian region of Tver.

But Medvedev yesterday responded to the demonstrations by announcing the launch of an inquiry into the violation reports.

"I disagree with the slogans and declarations made at the meetings," Medvedev wrote in his Facebook account.

"Nevertheless, I have issued instructions to check all polling station reports about (failures) to follow election laws," Medvedev wrote.

Medvedev's conciliatory remarks were met by a flood of ridicule on his Facebook page and quickly rejected as insufficient by both the liberal opposition and the Communist Party, the new parliament's second-largest bloc.

"Coward, coward and once again coward!" wrote blogger Sergei Slaikovsky in one of the more than 10,000 Facebook messages Medvedev received by Monday morning.

"We do not trust Medvedev's words," added Communist Party secretary Sergei Obukhov in an interview with AFP.

"The Communist Party is using every legal resource available to contest these vote results."

Former cabinet minister turned liberal Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov called Medvedev's promise to look into specific violation reports "a mockery".

"These are worthless instructions ... that are not going to calm anyone down," Nemtsov told Moscow Echo radio.

Rally organisers have already promised to return to the same Moscow square en masse on December 24 and possibly hold smaller rallies at various locations before then.

A coalition of liberal and nationalist groups on Monday asked the Moscow mayor's office to sanction the December 24 rally for up to 50,000 people just steps away from the Kremlin.

City authorities had until the middle of the week to respond.

Pro-Kremlin youth groups meanwhile were due Monday to stage their own mass gathering in central Moscow under the slogan "Glory to Russia!"

The authorities have previously used youth groups to demonstrate public support for Kremlin rule and the United Russia party that retained a narrow majority in parliament.

Russia vote will stand despite protests | Herald Sun

[Kermanshahan]

Some 70 people remain in custody following last week’s protests in Moscow against the allegedly fraudulent December 4 parliamentary elections, a police spokesman said on Monday.
Some 620 people were detained during the protests near Moscow’s central Chistiye Prudy subway station and downtown Triumfalnaya Square early last week.
More than 300 protesters were detained during Monday's demonstration at Chistiye Prudy, which gathered some 2,000 people, according to police estimates. The unofficial number of participants had been put at 5,000.
The protest against what many view as widespread vote rigging in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party during the December 4 polls was authorized by the authorities. Police dispersed the demonstration, however, when a crowd began marching towards downtown Moscow, which had not been permitted.
Another 300 people were detained during Tuesday's protest at Triumfalnaya Square, which also gathered some 2,000 people, according to official figures, and up to 6,000 people, according to unofficial estimates.
On Wednesday, some 30 people staged a protest at Triumfalnaya Square. Around 20 participants in the unsanctioned demonstration were detained. A major protest on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on Saturday, which gathered between an officially estimated 25,000 and 40,000 participants, ended peacefully.
The police spokesman said "no more than 70 people are currently being held in detention centers following court decisions on their administrative arrest." The majority of those in custody were detained during the protests, he said.
The remainder of those detained have been released after receiving a warning, the spokesman said. The cases of those detained over disobeying police orders are to be considered by magistrate courts, while the others guilty of participating in illegal demonstrations face fines, he added, without elaborating on the number of such cases.
Among those detained during the protest at Triumfalnaya Square were controversial anti-corruption activist and blogger Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, leader of the opposition Solidarity movement. Both men have been sentenced to 15 days in jail for disobeying police orders during the protests.

Some 70 people remain in jail following Russia vote protests | Society | RIA Novosti

[Roshangar]

Return of the "colour" revolutions; Ukrainian/Georgian style.

To champions of the recent "democratic movements"; Is it too dangerous to execute a no fly zone i.e indiscriminate carpet bombing (Libyan style) over Russia for your political ambitions? Bring back the banal "colour revolution" B.S. Hey it worked in some east European countries before! Just cross your fingers and.... May "The Force" be with you.

Cheers.

[NEWUSER]

FOX fakes Moscow protest with footage of Athens clashes.

It's not FOX news fault, they probably thought Athens was in Russia.

[HEAVEN]

Hoping after all this russian will see that everything usa is saying about Iran is also a lie, i hope they will not support sanctions against us again.
also i want them to lift sanctions.

[Kermanshahan]

Moscow city authorities gave on Wednesday permission for a 50,000-strong rally to protest against alleged election fraud in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party, officials said.
The march will take place on December 24 at downtown Moscow's Sakharov Avenue.
Opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov said on his Facebook page that the opposition’s task is to attract “no less than 300,000 people.”
Almost 19,000 people have so far registered for the For Fair Elections rally on the organizers' Facebook page.
The organizers of the protest campaign submitted three possible venues for the protest to City Hall: Sakharov Avenue, Vasilyevsky Spusk and Manezhnaya Square. The latter two are adjacent to the Kremlin.
“City Hall said that we are not allowed to stage a rally at Vasilyevsky Spusk and Manezhnaya Square because these sites had already been booked…We haven’t been told who has booked them,” the news web site Gazeta.ru quoted A Just Russia member Ilya Ponomarev as saying.
Earlier Matvei Dzen, a lawyer for the ROD-Russia nationalist movement, said in his blog that they had also requested all three sites for their own demonstration on December 24.
However, the Slavic Union head Dmitry Dyomushkin said that the city's officials had dismissed the nationalists' request.
Moscow city hall later said a rally by nationalist movements was authorized in the southeast of Moscow on December 24, from 12:00 to 16:00 Moscow time [8:00 to 12:00 GMT].
A protest by the opposition Yabloko party against alleged election fraud was also authorized for December 17 and will take place at Bolotnaya Square, which saw the biggest anti-government protest in almost two decades last Saturday. About 10,000 people are expected to take part.
Last Saturday demonstrations against alleged electoral fraud in favor of the ruling United Russia also took place across the country, from the European exclave of Kaliningrad to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Some 7,000 people also rallied on Saturday in Russia’s second city of St. Petersburg.

Moscow set for new mass vote protest rally | Russia | RIA Novosti