Moscow unrest - thousands arrrested, barely a dozen charged

Moscow unrest - thousands arrrested, barely a dozen charged

As the fog of smokebombs disperses, a few concrete details are beginning to emerge about Wednesday night’s unrest on Moscow’s streets.

And police have confirmed that a number of criminal cases will follow after more than 1,300 people were arrested during a series of stand-offs in city squares and at metro stations.

But while the cops are preparing charges of hooliganism, attempted murder and use of violence against a government representative, few of the incidents in question relate to the epicentre of last night’s events near Kievsky Railway Station.

Seizing an arsenal

But the two flashpoints he highlighted happened away from the Kievskaya area, at Park Kultury and Yugo-Zapadnaya stations.

A document check on 12 people at Yugo-Zapadnaya at around 7 pm went wrong when the crowd turned on the three police officers.

“The young people did not obey the legitimate orders of the police and began to attack them,” Markin said. “As a result the officers suffered injuries of varying severity.

“As more police arrived at the scene all the attackers were detained. They were natives of the North Caucasian republics.”

Kultury confusion

The suspects were described as three Dagestani natives who shot at a Muscovite with a traumatic weapon in the metro station, RIA Novosti reported.

Markin said the trio had attacked a 26-year-old local man and fired several shots at him and praised the “skilful actions of the police officers” who arrested all three suspects at the scene.

Nationalist arrests

And a police source told RIA Novosti that one of the ringleaders of a radical organisation was among those seized outside Kievsky station.

Members of the group were carrying traumatic weapons, knives and even an axe.

No official information was available on his case, or the 40 or so colleagues arrested at the same time.

But the source claimed police were preparing civil and criminal cases against some of the group on charges of inciting a riot.

Moscow unrest - who was behind Wednesday's disturbances?

Wednesday night’s disturbances in Moscow, which saw a total of 1,320 people arrested, may have been staged by the authorities to improve the police’s reputation.

After taking a battering – both literally and figuratively – in Saturday’s riots on Manezhnaya, Wednesday’s police response was widely seen as a success for the authorities.

Despite the vast number of arrests and the alarming sight of several areas of the city closed down, there was no repeat of the massed violence of the weekend.

And by 8:30 pm the centre of town was largely calm, with fewer people than usual on the metro or in the streets and no sign of the marauding gangs of nationalists and Caucasians supposedly ready for a fight.

Success or stage show?

But the very fact that the mayor – who made no comment in the aftermath of Saturday’s riot – attended the event as planned leads some to suspect that he knew there was no danger of more serious trouble.

Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told radio station Kommersant FM that Sobyanin knew in advance what was going to happen.

“I think he understood that there was no serious unrest in the city today,” Belkovsky said on air. “Rather, it was staged, organised specially so the Moscow police and security agencies could save face and recover a reputation which was seriously ailing over their real-life efforts on Manezhnaya.

“That is why the ambassadors’ reception was not cancelled and the mayor was as confident as ever.”

Paid performers

Instead he claimed that many were paid agitators, willing to be briefly arrested in front of the media before being quietly released soon afterwards with a few hundred roubles as a thank you.

“The authorities in general and the police in particular want to show that they are able to control the situation in Moscow, and thus make everybody forget about Dec. 11 when they were apparently impotent.”

Reasons to agree

But he told The Moscow News there could be some truth in what he said – and, like Belkovsky, pointed out that members of Nashi, a notorious pro-Kremlin youth group, had been seen at both events.

“I am not ready to say 100 per cent that it is so,” he told The Moscow News. However, he agreed that “police and the Kremlin wanted to rehabilitate themselves after the full fiasco of Dec. 11.”

Pribylovsky also said that there were a lot of Nashi members in the riots, and one possible explanation was “that [Nashi founder Vasily] Yakemenko sent them to riot a little and work as extras.”

The second version, according to Pribylovsky, is that “Nashi are just Nazis deep down. They do not need to be ordered [to go to riots]. They do it for the soul.”

Officials see an unknown hand

“Certainly and unfortunately, anonymous forces are behind the riots happening now in Moscow that the law-enforcement managed to block,” Fedotov said. “Someone is very interested in inflaming the tensions, in the atmosphere of violence in the country.”