Moscow police on Tuesday night arrested four people near an improvised memorial to the victims of the building bombing in Dnipro, Ukraine, which killed at least 45 people, according to a specialized NGO.
“Police arrested two people who were laying flowers, the other two were in close proximity,” said the NGO OVD-Info, which specializes in monitoring political repressions in Russia, citing a witness at the scene.
According to the NGO, it was activists from the nationalist group SERB, which regularly disrupts opposition rallies in Russia, who called the police after going there.
In recent days, anonymous people have laid flowers and a photo of the destroyed building at the foot of the statue of Ukrainian poet Lessia Oukrainka in Moscow, erecting a makeshift memorial to the victims of Dnipro.
The strike on this apartment building, which took place on Saturday, left 45 dead and 79 injured, according to the latest report, making it one of the deadliest bombings since the Russian offensive began.
Kyiv accused the Russian army of bombing the building with a supersonic anti-ship missile, allegations denied by the Kremlin, which summoned a Ukrainian anti-ship missile that would have fallen on the building.
Public demonstrations against the offensive in Ukraine are very rare in Russia, against a background of widespread repression of critical voices.
According to the NGO OVD-Info, since they started on February 24, 2022, almost 20,000 people have been arrested in Russia at rallies against the intervention in Ukraine.
The Russian authorities have also beefed up their legislative arsenal to silence critical voices, urging thousands of Russian activists and journalists to leave the country.
Several people have already been sentenced to long prison terms after being found guilty of publishing “false information” about the Russian army. Thousands more were fined.