Thousands Rally In Russia for Political Prisoners

Thousands of people attended an opposition rally in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square. The Bolotnaya rally comes on the first anniversary of a mass antigovernment protest that ended in riots and the arrests of hundreds of demonstrators protesting Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency. The rally is calling for the release of over two dozen protesters detained since last year. Police say around 8,000 protesters attended Monday’s sanctioned event called ‘For Freedom!’ Organizers expected up to 30,000 to turn up for the meeting. Opposition leaders, including anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny, co-chairman of Parnas party Boris Nemtsov and leader of democratic party Yabloko Sergey Mitrokhin, addressed the crowd from a stage assembled on top of a truck. They demanded to stop “repressions,” to release “political prisoners,” and to ban the same person from being elected president more than twice. Russia’s current constitution states that the same person cannot be elected head of state “for more than two terms running.”

http://www.rferl.org/media/photogallery/24978494.html
http://rt.com/news/bolotnaya-opposition-rally-protest-879/
http://grani.ru/Politics/Russia/activism/m.214447.html#media-214449 (video)