Russian police detained at least twenty journalists on Saturday during a rally on Red Square organized by the wives of soldiers fighting in Ukraine and demanding the return of their men from the front, writes AFP.

An AFP cameraman who was detained during the demonstration said that around 20 to 25 journalists, including foreign ones, were with him in a van on the way to a police station in the capital, News.ro said.

A video appeared on social networks in which the police lead journalists in yellow vests to a police minibus.

According to The Moscow Times, the detained AFP journalist said that about 40 people took part in the protest.

Russian and foreign journalists were detained while filming women who demanded that their partners be returned home from Ukraine.

There were also wives of mobilized Russians in Putin’s campaign headquarters

As the BBC Russian Service reports, 27 people, most of them journalists, were detained near the Kremlin.

Several dozen women who gathered near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Alexander Garden near the Kremlin to participate in the rally raised flowers in the air. Arrests began shortly thereafter. They then placed them on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the SOTA Telegram channel reports.

According to this publication, as a result, “almost all male journalists” were detained, including representatives of AFP and Spiegel magazine.

As SOTA reports, then the wives of the mobilized Russians went to the campaign headquarters of President Vladimir Putin, who is running for office again.

“There, the police continued to detain those men who could not be detained on Manezhnaya Street,” SOTA reports.

Wives of mobilized fighters often protest

The wives of those mobilized for the war in Ukraine have been regularly gathering outside the Kremlin for several weeks as a sign of protest.

The anger of the relatives of reservists mobilized on the orders of Vladimir Putin in September 2022 is a sensitive subject for the authorities, which have so far refrained from cracking down on this nascent movement.

Police have previously refrained from intervening during other similar demonstrations in Moscow, although any outbreaks of protest are usually harshly suppressed in Russia.

The activism of the mobilizers’ wives has been largely ignored by Russian state media as the Kremlin seeks to project an image of unity around Putin ahead of his imminent re-election in March’s presidential election.

According to Vladimir Putin, 244,000 soldiers are currently fighting in Ukraine out of a total of 617,000.