A rally in support of Navalny was held in Moscow

Supporters of Alexei Navalny came out to a rally in Novopushkinsky Square in Moscow, the Ekho Moskvy radio station reports . On April 17, a hearing began in Kirov in the case of Navalny and Kirovles, but it ended unexpectedly quickly - the main hearing was postponed to April 24. It was precisely to coincide with the consideration of the case in Kirov that the organizers of the rally wanted to time the event.

The event was agreed upon in advance with the authorities. The protesters began to gather in the park starting at 18:00. In addition to the Alexei Navalny case, the rally also has a more global topic - pressure on the opposition from the current government.

The number of participants in the rally, according to eyewitnesses, exceeds the declared 1,000 people. Ksenia Sobchak, 30 minutes after the start of the rally, wrote on her microblog on Twitter : “The line to enter the rally is like at McDonald’s in 1991.”

An hour later, she summed up the first results of the rally on Facebook : “I think there were about 2.5-3 thousand people. Quite a lot for the one thousand allowed.”

People came to the park with photographs of Navalny and the “prisoners of Bolotnaya”. Ilya Ponomarev, Maria Gaidar, Evgenia Chirikova and the leader of the Yabloko party Sergei Mitrokhin came to the rally. The rally participants, along with the speakers, chanted “freedom for Navalny” and “freedom for political prisoners.”

However, it is worth noting that many of Alexei Navalny’s supporters are now in Kirov or trying to get to Moscow, which, according to Interfax, is not so easy: there are no more tickets for the nearest trains .

Read more about the case of Alexei Navalny and Kirovles in the special PublicPost dossier .