US condemns arrests Russia

washington - The United States Sunday the arrests of hundreds of protesters strongly condemned by the Russian police. They call the police actions during demonstrations against corruption in various Russian cities an attack on democratic values.

One of those arrested was opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was taken by the police in the center of Moscow.

'We call on the Russian government to immediately release the peaceful demonstrators,' said a spokesman for the US State Department who added that the US is concerned about the arrest of Russian opposition leader.

The demonstrations on Sunday are the largest protests in Russia since the eruption of unrest in 2011 and 2012. In some seventy Russian cities protested against alleged corruption and self-enrichment by the government. Hundreds of demonstrators, including initiator Aleksey Navalny, were arrested.

In Moscow alone, according to the police were 7,000 to 8,000 people in the leg and arrested a total of 500 people. A human rights organization that tracks the number of detention cases speaks of only 600 arrests in the Russian capital.

The immediate cause was a film that Navalny recently put online in which Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is portrayed as a billionaire, a sun king with not only houses and palatial dwellings in Russia, but also an old wine castle in Tuscany. The video was viewed by more than fifteen million Russians, but the Kremlin refused to respond to the allegations.