Russia hit by regional unrest over activist sentencing as Putin’s elections near

South-central Russia was hit by a rare wave of civil unrest on Wednesday (17 January) as thousands of protesters gathered to take a stand after a regional court sentenced Fayil Alsynov, an indigenous rights activist for the local Bashkir ethnic group.

The Baymak protest, which took place nearly 1,500 kilometres southeast of Moscow in the national republic of Bashkortostan, was the largest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It also comes two months before Russia’s presidential election in March, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to win.

Alsynov was sentenced to four years in a penal colony on charges of inciting ethnic hatred against migrant workers during a speech he gave last year to protest illegal gold mining.

In his speech, Alsynov had complained that while Bashkirs fought for Russia in Ukraine, their lands in Bashkortostan had been taken. In the speech, he used the term kara halyk, which in Bashkir means “common people”, but translates as “black people”, according to a report by RFE/RL.

Alsynov maintains his words were mistranslated from his native language of Bashkir into Russian.

On Wednesday evening, residents of the town of Baimak in the Ural Mountains region gathered in protest outside a court that sentenced the local activist.

Police special units violently cracked down on those gathered using tear gas and flash-bang grenades. According to Russian independent media reports, 40 people were injured, 22 of whom were police officers.

On Thursday morning, police detained six activists in the capital of the republic, Ufa.

Half a dozen protesters now face up to 15 years in jail, with authorities having opened a criminal case for “mass rioting” in Baymak.

Internet outages have been reported in the republic for the second day; the pages of several independent media outlets covering the protests were temporarily blocked in the messenger Telegram.

The Kremlin has not yet publicly commented on the events.

However, Radiy Khabirov, a former high-ranking official in President Vladimir Putin’s administration who is an acting governor of Bashkortostan , accused those gathered of separatism and that their actions were coordinated from abroad. 

A Duma deputy with the pro-Putin Russian ruling party United Russia, Dinar Gilmoutdinov, accused special services operating from Ukraine and the Baltic States of involvement in the organisation of the protest.

“Their main task is to rock the situation inside the republic at a difficult time for the country. They operate through affiliated telegram channels and other communication channels,” Gilmoutdinov wrote on his public channel on Telegram messenger.

Moscow in the past has come down harshly on dissent since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, arresting thousands.

In October 2023, another regional protest wave took place in a national republic of Russia, when riots and clashes with police broke out in the majority-Muslim republic of Dagestan after several hundred residents stormed the airport and hit the runway following rumours of refugees from Israel arriving in the republic who were speaking in support of Palestine.

Some 90 were reported to be detained.

Russia’s President Putin had said the riots “were organised through social networks from abroad” he mentioned Ukraine and also said that what happened “is not a trend”.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

Moscow Times’ Petr Kozlov is hosted at Euractiv under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.

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