RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – April 4, 2011
TODAY: St Petersburg march draws officials; Voina activists beaten, says lawyer; vendors on hunger strike; U.N. throws out Georgia case; Medvedev mediates on Investigative Committee / Prosecutor General row; reporter’s book on corruption seized by police.
350 people attended a march in St Petersburg yesterday, which saw high-ranking officials speak to the crowds ‘in an apparent bid to woo voters’, only to be met with ‘boos and shouts‘. Male students from St Petersburg State University have made a spoof calendar for their Mayor, Valentina Matviyenko, touching on some of her actions, including a suggestion that homeless people should be recruited to shovel snow. Dmitri Dinze, a lawyer for activists in the Voina group, says that his clients were severely beaten by police after being detained at last week’s Strategy 31 protests. Two Solidarity activists were arrested in Buryatiya for their part in an unsanctioned protest, says RFE/RL. 100 vendors from a closed-down Moscow market are on hunger strike, demanding a meeting with the Mayor over what they say was an illegal closure. The U.N.’s International Court of Justice has thrown out Georgia’s case against Russia which had accused it of ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin ally Sergei Mironov received a Medvedev-camp rebuke for suggesting that the presumption of innocence for state officials be abolished.