Protests have erupted across Russia this past week, with over two thousand people detained in the country, as they decry newly instated "partial military mobilization" laws that demand 300,000 men to go to war.
More than 800 people were detained across 35 cities in Russia on Saturday alone, according to independent Russian human rights media project OVD-Info. Reports include that minors were among those detained. As our chart shows, the highest concentration of arrests took place in the capital of Moscow (399) followed by St. Petersburg (143), Novosibirsk (71), Perm (26) and Irkutsk (20). On Wednesday 21, the day Putin announced the new rules, OVD-Info recorded even more arrests - a total of 1,311 detentions across 38 cities. These included 502 people in Moscow and 524 in St Petersburg.
According to Al Jazeera, tensions are especially high in poor ethnic-minority areas such as the southern Russian region of Dagestan, which has already lost a disproportionately large number of soldiers to the war in Ukraine.
Protests have taken place routinely in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, at great personal risk to individuals who are demonstrating. Find out more about the demonstrations in Russia here, including on March 6, when more than 5,000 people were arrested in a single day.
