Moscow police call a weekend sweep of hundreds of young people a ‘preventive measure.’ Detainees report beatings, military summonses, and pressure to sign army contracts.
On the evening of November 7, police carried out a mass roundup in Moscow’s Kitai-Gorod neighborhood. By the most widely cited estimates, 150 to 200 people were detained in total (though some reports put the number at 300), most of them young people, including minors. It was a planned raid: around 8 p.m., 10 police vans pulled up to Gorka Park on Bolshoi Spasoglinishchevsky Lane, and police loaded young people into them. Eyewitnesses said police were rounding up “anyone and everyone.”
Those detained were taken to police stations and held for several hours. Detainees said they were not allowed to drink water or use the bathroom while in the police vans. One person who used an e-cigarette was beaten. Another detainee’s parents said he was hit in the stomach several times, and there were other reports of police brutality as well. There were no reports of any detainees being held at a police station overnight.
Police refused to let parents in to see the detainees, and by late that night a crowd had gathered outside the Tagansky district police station. Parents tried to get inside as police officers held them back. “We pay your salaries! Freeloaders!” some in the crowd said. Yet it was the police themselves who had summoned parents to the station: minors were being released to their legal guardians.
At least 17 detainees were cited for drinking in public, and some were handed military summonses. The human rights project Idite Lesom reported that two people contacted it after receiving summonses ordering them to report on November 9 “to update their military registration records.” One of them has health problems but does not have the paperwork to prove it; the other has a deferment because he is a doctoral student. Some detainees were persistently urged to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry, while others were fined for disobeying police officers.
The Interior Ministry called the raid a “preventive measure.” In a video, the mother of one detainee said she was told at the police station that children are not allowed in central Moscow at all, especially on weekends. “Because of the situation in the country,” she added.
Even Yekaterina Mizulina, the head of the Safe Internet League, who is known for reporting people to the authorities, cautiously stood up for the teenagers. “I’m watching the videos from the police stations that the media are posting right now. I don’t understand why the parents of minors aren’t being let inside,” she wrote on Telegram.
The November 7 raid was the largest, but far from the only one: teenagers have been detained in central Moscow all year. The outlet Post- has counted six major raids targeting young people in Kitai-Gorod since the beginning of the year.
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