HILLARY WOULD BE TIGHTENING THE SCREWS:

In defiance of expectations, this year's elections to the Moscow City Council have turned into a chain of political scandals and street protests. And in response, large-scale protest actions have been held in the city centre since mid-July. Public meetings with independent candidates running for the council on 27 July and 3 August ended in protesters being detained en masse (1,373 people on 27 July and 1,001 people on 3 August, according to OVD-Info), paralysing police stations and district courts.

The authorities are calling these events "mass riots", accusing the opposition of attempting a "state coup" and trying to scare Muscovites with chaotic arrests, interrogations and searches. For many city residents, this counter-campaign doesn't look particularly convincing: the contradictions of the Russian regime lie at the core of these protests, and exceed the ambitions of individual candidates.

The protesters' principal demand is to allow candidates, who aren't aligned with either the Moscow Mayor's Office or political parties, to participate in the city council elections. At the beginning of July, the city's district election commissions refused to register two dozen independent candidates according to a series of absurd reasons. This provoked disbelief from Muscovites. According to the commissions, some registration documents were missing signatures from handwriting analyses. Other commissions made intentional mistakes when checking the personal information of supporting signatories against Interior Ministry databases. And others simply made new, incorrect documents.

Appeals at higher election commissions has only made supporters more angry. 

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