Cold and rainy weather in Washington, D.C., did not prevent a rally in support of fair elections in Russia, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported.
About 30 people attended the protest rally that was held in front of the Russian Embassy on Saturday and lasted two hours.
“Many came from Maryland, Virginia, and there were a lot of Washington residents, of course,” rally participant Vita Kudryavtseva from Baltimore (Maryland) told RIA Novosti.
“The demands remain the same: we demand the cancelation of the State Duma elections and fair presidential elections,” she said.
The Washington rally came as tens of thousands of protesters marched and rallied across Russia on Saturday, with their key demands being Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s resignation and fair elections.
Across the capital, Putin supporters also rallied to urge an end to “the Orange Revolution,” a reference to the uprisings that saw regime change in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia almost a decade ago.
The protest came exactly a month before the March 4 presidential polls in which Putin, 59, is to seek a third stint in the Kremlin. He was barred by the Constitution from standing for a third consecutive term in 2008 and handed over power to his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev.
Protest organizers had expressed fears on the eve of the rally that the Arctic-like cold that has gripped Moscow for over a week would see a much lower attendance on Saturday than at the two previous mass opposition rallies in December, but their fears turned out ungrounded.
Those protests came in the wake of alleged vote fraud in favor of Putin’s United Russia party at December’s parliamentary polls and were the biggest show of dissent here for almost two decades. They also signaled a dramatic revival of a grassroots politics that had previously been limited to isolated radical and fringe groups.
The participants of the Washington rally read out loud addresses by journalist Olga Romanova and opposition leader Grigory Yavlinsky.
“I am on the whole content with the way the rally was held. We are glad we were able to support like-minded fellows in Russia. Everything was calm,” one of the rally organizers, Nikolai Sergeyevykh, said on Facebook.
