Putin says US provoking unrest in Russia

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the United States of provoking the post-election protests in Moscow and warned that demonstrators who broke the law would be punished.

Reuters

Around 1,000 people have already been arrested in three days of protests alleging mass fraud in the parliamentary polls.

Organisers plan a mass protest in Moscow at the weekend

In his first public comments on the demonstrations, Putin lashed out at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, he said, had criticised Sunday's elections before even reading the reports of international monitors.

Clinton had complained that the polls were neither free nor fair, a concern echoed by the last president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who said they should be re-run due to ballot rigging.

Putin said Russia did not want to see the instability endured by Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, two ex-Soviet states that saw regimes toppled in so-called "colour revolutions" after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Over 20,000 people have pledged on a Facebook page called "for honest elections" to attend the protest on Saturday afternoon on Revolution Square, just metres from the Kremlin walls.

While the rally is officially sanctioned by the authorities, the permission is for a maximum of 300 people, raising the prospect that it will be broken up by anti-riot police if greater numbers show up.