E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Denis Sinyakov / Reuters
Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny speaks with journalists as he leaves a police station on the day of his discharge in Moscow on Dec. 21, 2011. Navalny was arrested at an opposition protest in Moscow on December 5.
Reuters reports from MOSCOW:
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny used his release from jail on Wednesday to call on Russians to unite against Vladimir Putin whom he said would try to snatch victory in a March 4 presidential election that was sure to be unfair.
Navalny, who has harnessed a mood change among Russia's urban youth against Putin's 12-year rule, was greeted by chants of 'Navalny, Navalny' and applause from supporters who braved a blizzard to await his release from a Moscow police station.
Initially weary and dazzled by scores of television camera lights, Navalny swiftly embarked on a dissection of the disputed December 4 parliamentary election, brandishing his slur of Putin's ruling party as a collection of "swindlers and thieves."
"The party of swindlers and thieves is putting forward its chief swindler and its chief thief for the presidency," Navalny, dressed in jeans and holding a plastic supermarket bag full of clothes, told reporters after his release.
"We must vote against him, struggle against him," Navalny said. "If he does become president, he will not become a legal president, it will be an inherited throne."
Navalny, a 35-year-old anti-corruption blogger, was detained on December 5 for obstructing justice at an opposition protest in central Moscow against alleged vote rigging in the parliamentary election. He was sentenced to 15 days in jail. Read the full story.
Mikhail Voskresensky / Reuters
Policemen detain activists from the Other Russia opposition movement during a rally to protest against the first session of Russia's State Duma and violations during the recent parliamentary elections in Moscow on Dec. 21, 2011.
Ivan Sekretarev / AP
Police officers detain a protester outside the State Duma, the Russian Parliament's lower chamber, during its first session after recent elections, in downtown Moscow on Dec. 21, 2011.
Previously on PhotoBlog:
Leave a Comment:
Given Russia´s history, I´d say this fellow is very courageous.
I bet he´s found dead by the end of January.
agreed....with a hefty dose of radiation emmanating from his body....or 2 slugs to the back of the head
He should seek political asylum in some other country before they ruin his life, or his health.
Hey Putin. What's next? An "IRAN," you know, where you allow your citizens to vote, and then you lose, and before you announce the results, you change the results, and when the people know they've been swindled, protest, and then you send out the secret police to beat everybody, and when the people don't stop, you arrest everybody and anybody including opposition leaders and candidates, and then you torture them in your secret prisons, or kill them, or harasss so much they can't move,,,,You know, an "IRAN"
This is what Russia is all about? Putin is an ex. KGB man. If you really expected mother Russia to be a democratic state that has fair elections, then you should have your head examined. Their online newspaper http://english.pravda.ru/ is so anti US and anti west. They consider Gadaffi and Assad hero's and the US the devil. I may not always agree with what the US does but at least I don't have to worry about my life being taken away like all the Russian Journalist who write about the corruption in Russia. I think that 17 Journalist have either been beaten to a pulp or murdered.
"The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006 shocked the world. "Yet for every Anna, there have been many less widely known journalists killed for their work across Russia," says the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in a groundbreaking report on the 313 Russian journalists killed since 1993."
source = ifex.org
The Russian people are blind, just like we were electing Bush two times.