On Monday, Russian police forces arrested more than 550 protesters who massed in dispute of Sunday’s elections which named Vladimir Putin president fora third term. The demonstrators either were attending unsanctioned rallies, or refused to leave once sanctioned rallies were over.
Moscow police arrested at least 250 protesters while St. Petersburg authorities collared another another 300.
Putin won 64 percent of the Russian vote according to The Wall Street Journal.
While thousands of Russians braved bone-chilling temperature to vent their frustrations with Putin and to protest possible fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections, only a few hundred took to the streets to dispute the presidential election results.
Putin dismissed his detractors, calling them “an element of the political struggle … that is not related to the elections.”
The official election result was not close.
Putin’s 64 percent of the vote easily tripled the Communist party’s Gennady Zyuganov’s 17.18 percent. Mikhail Prokhorov, an independent billionaire who owns the New Jersey Nets franchise finished third with 7.98 percent.
A large force of police and riot control officers overwhelmed the protesters, who accused Putin’s supporters of stealing the election. The advocates were released on Tuesday.
Michael McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, responded to the arrests via Twitter. “Troubling to watch arrests of peaceful demonstrators at Pushkin square. Freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are universal values,” he wrote.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted a reply, saying that Russian police had shown much greater restraint than U.S. officers did in removing protesters from sites in the Occupy movement.
Prokhorov was furious at the arrests in the aftermath of his election defeat, and on Twitter said the police “broke the tradition of the recent peaceful protest rallies in the country.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed the police acted within the law in rounding up protesters, according to Reuters.
“The opposition action consisted of two parts, legal and illegal,” Peskov said. “In both cases, the police acted with the highest professionalism and acted legitimately and effectively, within the competence of the law.”
To some, the arrests seem to be a turning of the page for Russian’s rights to demonstrate publicly.
While Russians have been allowed to protest freely in recent months, some fear that such public displays will be forbidden now that Putin is back in power.
The United States has called for an independent investigation into all allegations of voting irregularities in Sunday’s elections, something that former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock, now a Columbia University professor, dismisses.
“Let’s hope that Putin … and our own president and secretary of state are rational enough to understand that basically most of American and Russian national interests are in synced, and that we’re not going to solve the big problems if we don’t cooperate,” Matlock told The Daily Caller.
Above all else, he said, only Putin knows how Putin will react.
“I don’t think any of us can say what his policies are going to be, other than he himself,” Matlock explained, “and he may hold his cards fairly close to his chest at this point … let’s wait and see what happens.”
Opposition leaders in Moscow have scheduled their next protest for this Saturday. That event will test their ability to draw a crowd. It may also test Putin’s patience as the newly elected leader.
