Anton Belyayev. Photo: Telegram
A member of the banned National Bolshevik party was arrested in the Russian Urals on Saturday for organising a protest against this weekend’s regional and local elections, while elsewhere in the country several attacks and voting irregularities were reported as the three-day voting period came to a close on Sunday.
Anton Belyayev, who heads the banned far-left, ultra-nationalist National Bolshevik Party in the city of Perm, was given five days in police custody on Saturday for disobeying police orders, human rights NGO OVD-Info reported.
According to the authorities, Belyayev ignored police warnings to stop posting leaflets reading “fuck these elections” in protest against the re-election bid of incumbent Perm Governor Dmitry Makhonin, who is running unopposed, before attempting to evade being detained.
Belyayev was also fined 7,000 rubles (€72) for campaigning and distributing political materials in the 24 hours leading up to an election and during the election itself, according to Nationalnaya Pravozashchita, a Russian nationalist rights group.
On Saturday, Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova announced that around 10 million people had already cast their ballots, with 80% of voters doing so using remote electronic voting (REV).
According to Russian Election Monitor, a European transparency initiative, the use of REV removes all public oversight of electronic vote counts by preventing voters from verifying how their ballots were counted and eliminating the possibility of a paper-based recount.
So far, irregularities have been observed in at least five Russian regions, with independent election analyst Ivan Shukshin reporting that early voting figures had revealed inflated turnout figures.
Elsewhere in Russia, scattered violence also overshadowed the ballot on Saturday, with multiple election observers and officials subjected to violent attacks throughout the day.
In western Russia’s Voronezh region, opposition election observer Vasily Potapov was beaten by several masked men and hospitalised, according to Ploshchad, a local independent news outlet, while in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region, a group of unidentified men attacked an election officer, leaving her with brain injuries, according to Telegram channel Krasny Temnik.