MOSCOW: Vladimir Putin will on Monday be inaugurated for his fourth Kremlin term under the shadow of hugely strained ties with the West and a crackdown on the opposition, with Alexei Navalny and hundreds more detained at the weekend.
Opposition leader Navalny was held along with nearly 1,600 of his supporters on Saturday during nationwide rallies against Putin as police and paramilitary activists used force to break up demonstrations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Putin, who has ruled Russia for 18 years and used his last term to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launch a military campaign in Syria on …read more
Source: theSun
