TODAY: Opposition protesters detained; pro-Medvedev march permitted. Monitors concede that Medvedev would have “won anyway.” World leaders comment on the result. Moscow authorities have “repeatedly refused to authorize opposition marches on the grounds that they would snarl traffic and inconvenience people.” But thousands of pro-Kremlin youths were permitted to march across central Moscow to celebrate the election of Dmitry Medvedev as president, “paralyzing” the traffic. Riot police “roughly detained” dozens of opposition protesters, including Union of Right Forces leader Nikita Belykh, for marching in central Moscow. And in St Petersburg, an opposition march was given authorisation after the organizers agreed to change the route. Monitors of the weekend’s elections felt that Medvedev “would have won the election anyway.” Andreas Gross, the head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) observer mission, which was one of the few international monitoring groups on hand for the March 2 vote, has questioned the nature of the election process and called the vote a “plebiscite”. Watch the video here.