According to civil rights activists, several participants were detained after the funeral of Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny in Moscow.
A man and a woman who were at Friday's funeral and previous memorial events for Navalny were arrested today, the organization OWD-Info said. According to information, a Muscovite had already spent yesterday night in a detention cell.
Officers reportedly tracked the woman down because a video camera captured her shouting the words “Gerojam slawa” (“Glory to the Heroes”) at the memorial service, which expressed support for Ukraine attacked by Russia. According to information from OWD, she was later sentenced to a fine.
OWD-Info spokesman Dmitry Anissimov told Russian news channel Agentstwo that it was still too early to talk about the start of a wave of arrests. But he emphasized that his organization had already warned that police could track participants after the event thanks to video recordings and new facial recognition technologies.
On the day of the funeral itself, more than 100 people were arrested – although only a few of them in Moscow and most of them in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Furthermore, there have already been hundreds of arrests in the days following Navalny's death, when people wanted to lay flowers at monuments to the well-known opposition politician.