‘Russia Without Putin’ Россия без Путина!

Russians rallied across the country against election fraud in the biggest protests faced by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in his 12 years in power.



Twenty-five thousand people gathered in the center of Moscow today in near-freezing temperatures and dispersed after 6 p.m. without detentions or violence, police said. Several thousand demonstrated in St. Petersburg and more than 15,000 in about 30 other cities across the world’s biggest country by area, RIA Novosti reported.


The swelling resentment threatens to weaken Putin’s bid to return to the Kremlin in a presidential contest in March. His United Russia party retained a narrow majority in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, amid accusations of vote rigging in the Dec. 4 parliamentary ballot.


“We are for free elections, we are for democracy,” Ilya Ponomaryov, a Duma lawmaker and one of the protest organizers, told the crowd in Bolotnaya Square, on an island just south of the Kremlin. “We want a recount of the vote.”


As many as 150,000 people turned out for the biggest rally in the capital in two decades, said Vladimir Ryzhkov, a former lawmaker. The organizers are planning to stage protests the next two weekends and will apply for a permit to hold a 500,000- person rally on Sakharov Prospekt, he said.