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Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia's first mobilisation since
World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine,
warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he would be
ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.
Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition leader who is
currently in prison, said Putin was sending more Russians to
their death for a failing war.
"It is clear that the criminal war is getting worse, deepening,
and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in
this," Navalny said in a video message from jail recorded and
published by his lawyers.
"He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this
blood," Navalny said.
Since the Feb. 24 invasion, Putin has cracked down on dissent
and the media, with thousands arrested at anti-war protests and
a new law that calls for 15-year prison sentences for those who
distribute "fake news" about the military.
Russian state television casts critics as traitors who are in
the pay of the West. Putin says the country is in a battle with
the West over Ukraine which he says is being used by the United
States and its allies in an attempt to destroy Russia.
Russia's anti-war groups called for street protests against the
mobilisation order.
"This means that thousands of Russian men - our fathers,
brothers and husbands - will be thrown into the meat grinder of
war," the Vesna anti-war coalition said. "Now the war has come
to every home and every family."
It called for Russians to take to the streets in major cities on
Wednesday.
In the days after the start of the war, riot police cracked down
on nightly street protests detaining at least 16,000 protesters,
according to the OVD-Info rights group.
(Reporting by Jake Cordell; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and
Angus MacSwan)
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