Putin leads Russian naval parade after crackdown in Moscow

Russian President Vladimir Putin led Russia's first major naval parade in years Sunday, the day after a violent police crackdown on anti-government protesters in Moscow.

Putin Sunday morning went aboard one of the vessels in the Navy Day parade in St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland. The parade, the biggest in years, included 43 ships and submarines and 4,000 troops.

Putin was spending the weekend away from Moscow, the Russian capital, where nearly 1,400 people were detained Saturday in a violent police crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. A Russian group that monitors police arrests gave the figure Sunday, saying it was the largest number of detentions at a rally in the Russian capital this decade.

Police wielded batons and wrestled with protesters around the Moscow City Hall after thousands thronged nearby streets, rallying against a move by election authorities to bar opposition candidates from the Sept. 8 ballot for the Moscow city council.

A week before, 22,000 took to the streets in a sanctioned protest, calling on authorities to reverse their decision ahead of the September city council vote.

After that demonstration, investigators raided the homes and headquarters of a number of disqualified candidates. Top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was jailed for 30 days for calling the fresh protest.

Several would-be candidates were detained before or during the protest on Saturday. Navalny's team has called for another rally next weekend.

OVD-Info, an organization that monitors protests, reported Sunday that 1,373 people were arrested.

It said this was the highest number since mass demonstrations in 2012, when tens of thousands protested Putin's return to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister.