Moscow: Russian investigators on Thursday raided dozens of regional offices of top protest leader Alexei Navalny as well as the homes of his supporters after mass opposition rallies this summer.
Navalny said the raids were the result of Kremlin “hysteria” after allies of President Vladimir Putin suffered major losses in local elections in Moscow on Sunday.
He said the raids were being carried out at more than 200 addresses in “the biggest police operation in Russia’s modern history”.
Police, investigators, national guard and security services were all involved and seized equipment such as phones and computers, he said.
Navalny has credited his strategic voting campaign for the ruling party losing almost a third of its seats in elections for Moscow city parliament, writing in a blog entry: “Why such hysteria? Two words: smart voting.”
Navalny said the raids were targeting his network of campaign offices and the homes of campaign coordinators and their relatives, as well as his Anti-Corruption Foundation, which has worked to expose officials’ questionable wealth.
Law enforcement agencies have not yet made any official comment on the raids. Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh accused authorities of trying to deal a “massive blow” to the organisation. “These raids are an act of intimidation,” she said. “The police’s only goal is to confiscate our material and paralyse our work,” she said, adding: “We won’t stop.”
Police targeted activists across the country from Russia’s westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad to the far eastern city of Vladivostok, Navalny’s aides said.
Yarmysh said she had seen a vehicle marked as belonging to the powerful Investigative Committee outside Navalny’s Moscow office but “we don’t have any raids”.
In the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals region, officers wearing scarfs over their faces and black uniforms without identifying marks prevented anyone from entering the office, local media reported.
The office in the city of Perm, also in the Urals, reported that operatives climbed through the windows and then pulled the front door down.
— AFP
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