Vladimir Putin joins bikers for a ride in Crimea

August 11, 2019 (Reuters) Russia's President Vladimir Putin attended a biker show organized by the Night Wolves motorcycle club on the peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, amid vast protests in Moscow and several Russian cities on Saturday (August 10). Russian state television showed Putin in a leather jacket shaking hands and hugging with Russian biker club leader Alexander Zaldostanov and riding a Ural motorcycle near the Crimean city of Sevastopol, while tens of thousands of Russians staged what a monitoring group called the country's biggest political protest for eight years, defying a crackdown to demand free elections to Moscow's city legislature.

Police rounded up scores of people after the demonstration in Moscow and at another rally in St Petersburg, and detained a leading opposition figure before it began. But the response from the authorities was milder than the previous week when more than 1,000 protesters were detained, sometimes violently. The White Counter monitoring group said up to 60,000 people had attended the Moscow rally, describing it as the biggest in Russia for eight years. Police put turnout at 20,000.

Russian liberal opposition gather for a rally protesting against unfair Moscow State Duma elections in the center of Moscow, Russia, August 10, 2019. The liberal opposition called their supporters to continue their protest actions against rejecting their candidates for Moscow City Duma elections, which are scheduled for September. (Photo: Yuri Kochetkov, EPA-EFE)

A month of demonstrations over elections for the Moscow city legislature have turned into the biggest sustained protest movement in Russia since 2011-2013, when protesters took to the streets against perceived electoral fraud. Crowds at the rally in Moscow roared "down with the tsar!" and waved Russian flags. They were demanding that opposition-minded candidates be permitted to run in a city election next month after they were not allowed onto the ballot. Putin and the Kremlin have so far avoided commenting on the unrest over the Moscow city elections.