(Reuters) -The movement of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny called on Monday for a campaign of civil disobedience to protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Putin declared war on Ukraine and is trying to make everyone think that Ukraine was attacked by Russia, that is, by all of us. But that’s not right,” the Navalny team wrote on its Twitter account.
“We must show that we do not support the war. We call on Russians to show civil disobedience. Do not be silent.”
Navalny, the most prominent opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was jailed last year when he returned to Russia from Germany after recovering from what Western laboratory tests established was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia. Russia denied carrying out such an attack.
Since then, authorities have clamped down even more tightly on his movement, and key figures have fled into exile after being designated by the authorities as “foreign agents”.
The OVD-Info group which monitors protests and arrests in Russia said 6,006 people had so far been arrested for anti-war demonstrations since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb.27 in what Putin said was a special operation to demilitarise and “denazify” the country. Ukraine and the West have dismissed that justification as baseless propaganda.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Mark Heinrich)
