Hundreds Detained in Moscow on Second Weekend of Protests

(Bloomberg) -- Russian police detained almost 700 people, including opposition leaders, at Moscow protests against the authorities' decision to ban anti-Kremlin candidates from running for the city council next month, according to independent legal-aid group OVD-Info.

The number of protesters being held reached 685 as of 6:40 p.m. local time, the group estimated on its website. The Moscow police unit on its website said that about 1,500 people participated in the “unsanctioned events” as of 5:56 p.m., with around 600 detained.

Lyubov Sobol, who works for the Anti-Corruption Fund run by opposition politician Alexey Navalny, was taken to a police station as she was getting into a taxi to the rally, as broadcast live by the online TV channel Dozhd. Sobol has been on a hunger strike for three weeks over the rejection of her candidacy.

Politician Kostantin Jankauskas was detained immediately after leaving a police detention center, where he spent the previous week after participating in last Saturday's rally, according to a video posted on the Twitter account of Olga Chesare, Sobol's colleague.

The rallies, running now for the second weekend in a row, come as President Vladimir Putin's approval ratings are at the lowest since 2013 after five years of falling living standards.

As the Moscow protests were escalating, Russia's Investigative Committee on Saturday opened a criminal case, alleging that Navalny's Anti-Corruption fund was part of a money-laundering scheme.

Unidentified employees of the fund and people close to it received about 1 billion rubles ($15.4 million) in cash and foreign currency from third parties in 2016-2018, transferred the money into bank accounts and then into the fund, the investigators said in a statement on the Committee website.

The Committee plans to “identify the sources of the illegally received money, and all the participants of the illegal scheme to finance the fund,” according to the statement.

Criminal Case

Earlier this week, the investigators opened a separate criminal case into the protests, calling them “mass unrests” and leaving participants vulnerable to sentences of up to eight years in prison and organizers facing as long as 15 years.

As a small concession, on Tuesday the Moscow electoral commission agreed to review the application of one rejected candidate, Sergei Mitrokhin, who represents the liberal Yabloko party.

--With assistance from Henry Meyer.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dina Khrennikova in Moscow at dkhrennikova@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Herron at jherron9@bloomberg.net, Brian Wingfield, Steve Geimann

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