On his birthday

Special unit storms memorial service for Navalny

Navalny would have been 48 years old on Tuesday.

(Bild: AFP/RALF HIRSCHBERGER)

Police in Russia's capital Moscow have cracked down on supporters of the deceased Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny who had gathered for a memorial service on his birthday. A special unit arrested around 30 mourners, as videos also show.

According to the civil rights organization Ovd-Info, representatives of a special unit stormed a room in north-eastern Moscow on Tuesday evening where several dozen people had gathered to watch the live broadcast of a Navalny memorial concert in Berlin. Around 30 people had been detained, searched and questioned in the meantime.

Putin's most dangerous opponent
Navalny, who would have turned 48 on Tuesday, was considered one of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics during his lifetime and has been a political prisoner since his imprisonment in 2021. Last February, he died in a prison camp in the far north of Russia for reasons that are still unknown. His relatives and supporters speak of murder - also because Navalny had only just survived a nerve agent attack a few years earlier in the summer of 2020 and was in poor health as a result.

At Navalny's funeral around three months ago, thousands of people surprisingly gathered in Moscow to mourn the popular opposition politician despite major repression. Otherwise, however, there are hardly any protests because the authorities usually nip them in the bud and arrest participants immediately.