Details about the unauthorized action of protest actions organized by opposition activist Aleksei Navalny continue to emerge. A video of a teenager sitting in a police van has gone viral on the Internet. The happy-looking teenager in the video can be heard saying: "We are fine, we will be paid 10,000 euros."
According to the teenager, Aleksei Navalny promised prior to the event that everyone who wold get arrested during the rally would have to file lawsuits at the European Court for Human Rights to complain about their illegal detention. "So everything is fine," the teenager said.
In a nutshell, Aleksei Navalny knew perfectly well that the rally was illegal. Therefore, he promised good money to participants of the rally and encouraged them to get arrested to be able to receive the compensation of 10,000 euros from the ECHR.
Navalny and the ECHR thus owe nearly 10.500,000 euros to the detainees, many joked on Twitter. converting the number of detainees into the promised euros.
The message was clear from the start: all the promises did not cost a thing. The goal was to make people take to the streets, cause a commotion and then leave all them with their own problems and consequences. This was the case with the protest action among long distance truckers.
Kremlin's official spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that minor participants of the rally in Moscow were indeed promised to receive cash rewards if they were arrested by law-enforcement officers.
"The Kremlin is "sober enough" in analyzing protest actions, and we do not tend to either downplay or exaggerate them," Peskov said. "Organizers of the rallies lied by calling the events legal, and jeopardized the lives of underage participants," he also said.
"The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has information about proposals for remuneration in the event of detention for participation in the unauthorized mass action on March 26 in Moscow, not only for adolescents, but also for other participants of the event," officials with the Investigative Committee said.
Naturally, liberal media and bloggers started saying that Peskov called all teenagers corrupt individuals. The calculation is to cause resentment and protests among those who do not read texts, but watch videos on YouTube.
It is worth noting that the actions of the police during the protest action in Moscow on March 26 were not only professional, but also quite humane. Apparently, Navalny and his comrades were counting on as many conflicts and clashes as possible. The police took adequate measures to prevent that from happening. All 46 arrested teenagers were released soon after their detention. Navalny is good at dumping his supporters when he feels that it's time to run. Aleksei Navalny himself was sentenced to 20,000 rules of fine and 15 days of administrative arrest. The young ones were not criminals, even though they committed certain violations during the protest actions. The adolescents, who believed Navalny's promises, are not criminals - the are juvenile victims of political swindlers.