A mother pleads with police, “Where are you taking him, he didn’t do anything!” and then addresses the crowd - “my son is a minor, he didn’t do anything!” Journalists run around, shouting “Let him go, he’s a journalist,” and then clapping when they managed to convince police to let go one of their own. Police in body armour are forming chains of three to five men. They run through the crowd, sometimes asking each other, “This one?” and appear to randomly grab people standing around peacefully, many of them recording the events on their smartphones.
These were some of the scenes and voices from mass detentions that happened on 15 July in central Moscow.
Just a few hours earlier, people gathered peacefully in Pushkin Square, also in central Moscow, calling for an annulment of the results of the recent constitutional amendment plebiscite. The opposition had denounced the vote as rigged. The response was mass detentions.
