Vladimir Putin, the thug who recently was "elected" de facto president for life in Russia, has now initiated the widely expected crackdown on opposition:
Police, prosecutors, governors and local officials across Russia have started to come down hard on upstart citizens, signaling an end to the winter of tolerance that characterized the run-up to the March 4 presidential election.
But the crackdown that has unfolded in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s victory has provoked a determined reaction. Local activists are pushing back, forging new alliances and strategies, concentrating on local levers and turning to the daunting task of organizing — house by house.
Members of a feminist punk band are in jail and facing seven-year sentences, accused of sacrilege for singing an anti-Putin song on the altar of Moscow’s cathedral. Environmental activists are organizing in their defense. A scientist who wants to save a rare forest by the Black Sea was thrown in a cell overnight Tuesday, along with his attorney, and faces five years on a charge of hooliganism. Opposition political leaders plan demonstrations on his behalf here and elsewhere Saturday.
“It’s a sign of the beginning of repressions against civic activists,” Sergei Mitrokhin, head of the Yabloko party, said in a statement on the arrests.
On Tuesday, Alexei Navalny and the staff of his anti-corruption blog were summoned for questioning by investigators from the police extremism department. Two days earlier, prosecutors decided to pursue a fraud case against the husband of Olga Romanova, who emerged as a prominent leader of the anti-Putin demonstrations.
Read the entire Washington Post article here
PS
Putin obviously thinks that he can continue as if nothing has happened, but he is wrong. The opposition against the mafia state he created is growing, and the former second rate KGB spy will not be able to stop it.
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