20,000 protest over Vladimir Putin’s election victory

The crowd, surrounded by hundreds of troops and police, chanted: “We are the power!”

Although voting irregularities at the presidential election were reportedly numerous, observers ruled that the vote was fairer than last December’s parliamentary election and said Putin would have won in any case.

But protesters said they would not accept the results. “These weren’t elections. This isn’t a president,” read one banner over the stage yesterday.

Opposition leader, the former chess world champion Garry Kasparov, 48, echoed that sentiment. “This was not an election,” Kasparov, told the crowd. “This was a special operation run by a thug who wanted to return to the Kremlin.”

But the crowd’s relatively small size compared to recent protests suggested the opposition movement has lost momentum.

Some of the new political energy that has emerged in Russia in recent months is being channelled into local politics and civic activism. Two men in their 20s who had both just won seats on municipal councils were among those who addressed the crowd yesterday to call on Muscovites to get involved in how their city is run, starting with their own neighbourhoods. The protest on Novy Arbat street ended peacefully, but leftist opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov and two of his followers were detained later as they tried to march to nearby Pushkin Square.

Since the 4 March presidential vote, Udaltsov has returned to the confrontational approach he adopted last year, when he spent a total of almost three months in jail as a result of defying city bans or restrictions on his protests.

Putin, 59, Russia’s president from 2000 to 2008, won 64 per cent of the vote and has pledged to appoint former president Dmitry Medvedev as his prime minister.