Protesters against local administration in the southern town of Lermontov were convinced to end their 10-day hunger strike by a Kremlin envoy on Thursday.
The Kremlin’s envoy to the Southern Federal District, Alexander Khloponin, personally traveled to the town to negotiate with protesters, whose numbers swelled from 27 to 37 overnight.
“We’ll keep details of the conversation [with Khloponin] under wraps, but that was enough to end the hunger strike and go home,” said on of the organizers.
Protesters insist that election authorities and courts weeded out unwanted candidates from the municipal elections set for Sunday to give regional administration control of Lermontov, a town of 22,000 in the North Caucasus resort area in the Stavropol region.
Activists briefly took the town hall at one point, with police surprisingly refusing to stop them. About 1,500 rallied against the snap elections last week.
A final round of court appeals by opposition candidates is set for review on Friday.
The regional administration has called protesters subversive agents employed by foreign powers.
Fourteen protesters on hunger strike were candidates for the elections, including representatives of the opposition A Just Russia and Liberal Democratic Parties, as well as one member of the ruling United Russia. The rest were residents of Lermontov or the surrounding area.
Two participants were hospitalized since the strike started on February 21, one of them continued the hunger strike on a hospital bed.
