Provocateurs with knives attacked Solidarity activists

Carmen Hernandez, an activist in the Solidarity movement, says:

- We have announced a competition for seeing off the winter. We wanted to launch the best stuffed Maslenitsa on balloons into the sky. Today at 16:00 we left the office on Pokrovka and went to Maslenitsa on Revolution Square. There were seven of us, and we carried a thousand white balloons - in a bunch. At 16:20, people surrounded us between the exit from the Teatralnaya metro station and the square itself. Guys, about 25 years old, identical black and gray hats, there were even a few girls. There were 20-30 of them. I recognized some of them - I saw them at the city hall on the 19th, when we tried to apply for a rally on March 5th. Then they openly said that they were from Young Russia. ( On the night of February 19-20 and on the morning of February 20, there were clashes between representatives of the opposition and activists of Molodoy Rossiya, who tried to push them away from the city hall building. rally on March 5 on Lubyanka Square The mayor's office never opened, but the leader of "Young Russia" Maxim Mishchenko brought his application from the back door – E.K. )

These guys took out paper-wrapped knives and started poking at our balloons. They don't put metal detectors on Maslenitsa, and they calmly brought knives. They concentrated and aggressively jumped at us, sometimes shouted “for Putin!”, well, they just cursed. They stepped on my foot so hard that the sole was torn off. Balloons - most of them have already burst - had to be released, of course. The people who celebrated Shrove Tuesday in the square stood in a circle to protect us. The police behaved very passively - only at the end, when it was clear that a fight might break out, they put up metal barriers around us.

We have already decided that we will hold the competition online, but we will launch the scarecrow anyway.