Riot police move in on anti-Putin rally in Moscow

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Thousands of riot police moved in on anti-Putin demonstrators who filled the streets of central Moscow chanting "Russia without Putin" in protest against Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin on Monday. Dozens of protesters were arrested, including protest leader Alexei Navalny.

Many protesters left promising to return for a sanctioned rally on Saturday, March 10th. Some, The Globe and Mail has confirmed, were planning to establish a tent city Monday night similar to those used by Ukrainian protesters during the 2004 Orange Revolution and Egyptian activists on Cairo's Tahrir Square last year.

Such rolling non-stop protests on a central Moscow square – just 1.5 kilometres from the Kremlin walls – would pose an unprecedented challenge to Mr. Putin's rule. The Kremlin and Moscow city authorities have both warned that they won't tolerate any effort to carry out an Orange Revolution repeat in Russia.

Thousands of extra riot police and Interior Ministry troops, many of them waiting in armoured vehicles, were deployed around Pushkin Square, where the opposition is legally permitted to demonstrate from 7 to 10 p.m. Monday night Moscow time (10 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST). They were backed by dozens of street sweeping vehicles parked in plain sight just around the corner from Pushkin Square.

At least 100 pro-Putin agitators stood in the middle of crowd, trying to shout down speakers.

The opposition protests were planned well in advance, but they gained justification earlier Monday when election monitoring missions sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe both concluded that Sunday's presidential election had been unfair, with state resources used to ensure Mr. Putin's easy victory.

"The point of elections is that the outcome should be uncertain. This was not the case in Russia, there was no real competition, and abuse of government resources ensured that the ultimate winner of the election was never in doubt," Tonino Picula, a spokesman for the OSCE monitors, said of a vote that saw Mr. Putin claim 63 per cent of the vote, 45 points clear of his nearest rival, Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. PACE made similar remarks, as did Golos, a Russian election-monitoring group that receives funding from the U.S. government.

Mr. Zyuganov, who has thus far refused to recognize Mr. Putin's win, has also called his supporters into the streets Monday for a parallel protest on Pushkin Square that is already underway.

In a meeting with three other defeated candidates, Mr. Putin said he would order Central Election chairman Vladimir Churov to "thoroughly look into" the mounting number of complaints. However, that seemed unlikely to appease critics who have been calling for Mr. Churov's dismissal since a December parliamentary election that was marred by similar allegations of fraud.

In what seemed like another effort to defuse anti-government sentiment, President Dmitry Medvedev made the surprise announcement that he was ordering a review of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's jail sentence. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is considered an icon of defiance by some members of the opposition, has been in jail since 2003 and is not due for release until 2017.

He was convicted seven years ago on charges of fraud and tax evasion that materialized after he dared to challenge Mr. Putin politically. New charges of embezzlement, and another conviction, came in 2010 as the end of his first jail sentence drew near.

It was hard to know what to make of the announcement, given that Mr. Medvedev is in the last weeks of his presidency. The long-time Putin protégé, who showed only flashes of independence from Mr. Putin during his time in the Kremlin, has mutely stepped aside to allow his old boss to return to the top job after Mr. Putin spent the past four years in the theoretically subordinate post of prime minister.

If the review of Mr. Khodorkovsky's case was an effort to soften the Kremlin's image in the eyes of its critics, Mr. Putin also made sure that he didn't come across as too soft, denying that he was crying as he thanked his supporters at a massive outdoor victory rally on Sunday.

"It was windy, the tears were real, but they were caused by the wind," he told supporters.