Russian authorities are harassing opposition leaders. Julia Ioffe explains the situation:
Why is the state doing this? [Opposition activist Ilya] Yashin has said that he thinks they are ginning up a criminal case against opposition leaders like him. More likely, it is a case of an overzealous machine seeking to please its master. If one reads the tea leaves—and that’s often all one can do in Russia—it is clear that Putin has had enough of the protests.
Go out and protest for fair elections, but the elections are now over, and he won. Now it’s time to go home. But people don’t seem interested in that, and both protests, on May 6th and on June 12th, drew tens of thousands of people. (In fact, many of those I spoke to at the protest on Tuesday said that they had planned on skipping the rally but changed their minds when they heard about the searches.)
How to deal with them? Putin is no Assad, and at least so far he has shied away from a real crackdown. But he’s clearly unhappy with the situation and wants it to go away.
(Photo: One of the detained Other Russia movement activists who tried to hold an unsanctioned protest outside the central election commission looks through a guarded window of the police vehicle in central Moscow with a photo of Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reading: 'Putin, Let Corruption Take You!' plastered on the window. By Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images)
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