(CBS) Moscow-- Protesters once again took to the streets of Moscow Saturday, decrying the exclusion of some independent and opposition candidates for upcoming city council election that has shaken up Russia's political scene. Moscow police detained at least 600 protesters Saturday, a monitoring group said, a week after authorities arrested nearly 1,400 people at a similar protest.
Lyubov Sobol, one of the excluded candidates and a driving figure of the current wave of protests, was among those detained. She was grabbed by police in central Moscow and hustled into a police van, loudly demanding to know why she was being held.
Demonstrators were aiming to hold a march along the Boulevard Ring, which skirts central Moscow and is a popular locale for people to walk around, despite repeated warnings that police would take active measures against a protest.
Helmeted riot police lined the route and started seizing demonstrators from a scattered crowd on Pushkin Square and pushing them back from another square further along the route.
Once a local, low-key affair, the September vote for Moscow's city council is now emblematic of the division within Russian politics and the Kremlin's ongoing struggles with how to deal with strongly opposing views in its sprawling capital of 12.6 million people.
"They (the authorities) are wiping their feet on us," one student at Saturday's protest told Reuters.
In the past month, the issue has provoked a surprisingly large outcry for a local election. On July 20, about 20,000 people turned out for a demonstration that was the largest in the city in several years.
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