Hundreds Arrested at Russian Protests About Ukraine Intervention

Russian police detained hundreds of demonstrators in Moscow this week, as opposition activists staged unauthorized protests against their government’s military intervention in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

A Fast-Moving Crisis

The protests came immediately on the heels of a formal vote by Russia’s Federation Council authorizing President Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian armed forces in Ukraine — a request Putin made amid escalating tension over Crimea following the ouster of Ukraine’s Moscow-aligned president, Viktor Yanukovych, during the Euromaidan uprising weeks earlier. Demonstrators gathered at multiple sites across Moscow, including Manezh Square near the Kremlin and outside the Defense Ministry, chanting slogans including “Stop the war” and carrying banners denouncing the intervention as imperial overreach, according to accounts of the demonstrations compiled after the fact.

Estimates of the protests’ scale varied significantly depending on the source: police reported only a small handful of attendees at some gathering points, while independent monitoring groups tracking arrests and turnout across the city’s various protest sites tallied several hundred participants overall. What both sides agreed on was the scale of the police response — plainclothes and uniformed officers moved quickly to break up the unauthorized gatherings, detaining well over 300 people in Moscow on charges connected to violating Russia’s strict rules on public assembly, according to contemporaneous reporting cited in The New Republic’s rolling coverage of the unfolding crisis.

A Split Russian Public

The anti-intervention protesters were not the only voices in Moscow’s streets that week. Russian state television, including the Kremlin-aligned network RT, gave prominent coverage instead to a competing, considerably larger rally in support of Russian-speaking populations in Ukraine — a demonstration organizers framed as solidarity with ethnic Russians they characterized as under threat from Ukraine’s new, post-Yanukovych government. That split — a genuine anti-war opposition movement operating alongside a larger, state-amplified pro-intervention counter-narrative — would come to define Russia’s domestic information environment throughout the Crimea crisis and its aftermath.

Opposition figures who took part in the anti-war demonstrations, including some prominent human rights and cultural figures, framed their protest explicitly around the risk of Russia’s growing international isolation, alongside opposition to what they viewed as a fundamentally illegal seizure of Ukrainian territory. That framing would prove prescient: within weeks, Russia moved to formally annex Crimea following a hastily organized referendum that the vast majority of the international community refused to recognize as legitimate, a move ultimately triggering broad international sanctions against Russia and setting in motion a broader conflict in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region that would continue for years afterward.

A Preview of Protests to Come

This week’s arrests marked only the first of several rounds of anti-war demonstrations Moscow and St. Petersburg would see as the Crimea crisis unfolded through March 2014. A subsequent march on March 15 — held the day before Crimea’s referendum — drew tens of thousands of participants, becoming, by some accounts, the largest anti-government demonstration in Moscow since 2012, though it drew a comparatively different, larger-scale police response than this week’s smaller, earlier gatherings.

For the hundreds detained this week, the arrests underscored a reality that would harden considerably over the following years: Russia’s tolerance for public dissent over its Ukraine policy, never expansive to begin with, was narrowing quickly even as the policy itself accelerated toward outcomes — annexation, international sanctions, and eventually a far larger war — that few protesters gathered in Moscow’s streets this week could have fully anticipated at the time.

For related coverage of state responses to protest movements, see our piece on Egyptian blogger Wael Khalil on opposition movements’ path forward, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.