Anti-Kremlin protests rock Russia's once sleepy hinterland

Tens of thousand people have been rallying on the streets of the regional capital of Russia's Far East since Saturday to protest the arrest of opposition governor Sergei Furgal and voice a general frustration with Moscow's perceived heavy-handed tactics. Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 people on the border with China and seven time zones away from Moscow, erupted in protest on Saturday when an estimated 30,000 people took to the streets chanting 'Free Furgal!' and 'Putin, resign!' Local media have described the rally as the largest in the city's history. Protests persisted on Sunday and Monday when hundreds of angry residents came out in defiance of an explicit ban on public gatherings. Khabarovsk's local government on Monday broke the silence on the weekend of peaceful protests, warning citizens against rioting 'We cannot allow mass unrest and clashes with law enforcement,' the government said in a statement on Monday. 'If you stand against lawlessness, don't break the law!' About a thousand people gathered on Monday evening in central Khabarovsk and marched through the streets, chanting 'Bring Furgal home!' and 'Furgal is our choice!' 'I've never seen that many people in my living memory,' Alexei Vorsin, a local activist aligned with opposition politician Alexei Navalny, told the Telegraph on Monday. With Mr Furgal beating the Kremlin candidate in 2018 'people felt there was a chance for change, and it's all been destroyed.' Alexei Izotov, a Khabarovsk businessman who is moving to western Russia this autumn, says the protests are channeling long-harboured frustrations with Moscow. 'The region is in disarray,' he told the Telegraph. 'Everything that's being said on TV about development and big projects is just fiction. People in the region feel both geographically and financially cut off from the rest of Russia.
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