Updated on
Summary
Russian police detained hundreds of people in Moscow and St.Petersburg on Wednesday, aiming to prevent new outbreaks of ethnic violence that erupted in the capital last weekend. Law enforcement authorities turned out in force near the central Kievsky railway station in Moscow, where nationalist ethnic Russian youths and migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia had been gathering for a rumoured confrontation. About 800 people were detained during the day-long operation, many of whom were armed with knives, clubs or stun guns, Moscow police spokesman Viktor Biryukov said, according to Russian news agencies. In St.Petersburg Russian police detained more then eighty people near one of the central metro stations. The police said they had managed to take control of the situation and no violence or serious injuries were reported in the city. Simmering tension between ethnic-Russian nationalists and minorities from the largely Muslim Caucasus and Central Asia escalated after the fatal shooting of a soccer fan last week in a Moscow street fight between members of the two groups. Thousands of soccer fans and nationalists rioted in Moscow central square outside the Kremlin on Saturday (December 11) and attacked passersby who appeared not to be Slavs -- violence President Dmitry Medvedev denounced as pogroms.Medvedev vowed on Monday to ensure those responsible for the violence were punished, in a warning that suggested the Kremlin is worried ethnic violence could intensify and spread.European Russia, and particularly Moscow, is home to a volatile mix of disenchanted ethnic-Russian youth and migrants from the Caucasus, part of which is in Russia, and impoverished ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia.
