Moscow:

Russian courts have sentenced dozens of individuals detained at occasions commemorating Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to brief jail sentences, official courtroom bulletins confirmed, with 154 sentenced in Saint Petersburg alone.

Details of rulings printed by the town’s courtroom service on Saturday and Sunday confirmed 154 folks had been given jail time of as much as 14 days for violating Russia’s strict anti-protest legal guidelines.

Rights teams and unbiased media retailers reported a handful of comparable sentences in different cities throughout the nation.

The 47-year-old Kremlin critic died on Friday on the Arctic jail colony the place he was being held on prices extensively seen as retribution for his campaigning in opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

Police over the weekend arrested a whole bunch of Russians in dozens of cities who got here to put flowers and lightweight candles in his honour at memorials to victims of Stalin-era repressions.

Anti-Kremlin demonstrations or public reveals of opposition to the regime are successfully unlawful in Russia underneath strict army censorship guidelines and legal guidelines in opposition to unapproved rallies.

Police and males in plain garments patrolled websites in dozens of Russian cities the place folks had gathered to commemorate Navalny over the weekend. 

There have been a number of experiences of them eradicating the pop-up memorials in a single day, and photographs confirmed hooded males scooping up flowers into bin baggage on a bridge subsequent to the Kremlin the place one other main Putin critic, Boris Nemtsov, was killed in 2015.

Putin silent

The information of Navalny’s loss of life, which got here only a month earlier than Putin is about to safe one other six-year time period within the Kremlin, triggered an outpouring of grief and anger amongst his supporters at residence and overseas.

Russian authorities had nonetheless not given Navalny’s mom or attorneys entry to his physique on Sunday, enraging his backers who had earlier referred to as the Russian state “killers” attempting to “cover their tracks.”

Putin has not commented on the loss of life of his most vocal critic and the Kremlin has not mentioned something since Friday night when it criticised Western leaders for saying they held Putin accountable.

Tributes to Navalny, who narrowly survived a poisoning assault in 2020 solely to fly again to Russia months later realizing he could be jailed, continued to pour in Sunday.

“Alexei Navalny wanted one very simple thing: for his beloved Russia to be just a normal country,” Leonid Volkov, his chief of workers and certainly one of his closest aides wrote on the X social media website.

“And for this Vladimir Putin killed him. Poisoned, imprisoned, tortured and killed him.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)