Far-right Saint Petersburg deputy Vitaly Milonov apparently has arrived at the antiwar demonstration as a counter-protester. Crowd shouts, "shame."
Police have warned participants over loudspeakers that their rally is unsanctioned and they risk arrest.
Russian news agency Interfax is reporting that Ukrainian forces are pulling back from certain areas in the east "to avoid encirclement":
The Ukrainian Armed Forces and other formations have left a number of towns and villages in Donbas to straighten out the line they control and also to get entrenched on new positions, the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (SNBO) announced.
"With the purpose of straightening out the line that is currently controlled by the Ukrainian military it was decided to transfer our formations to new positions, to fortify them for further control over the situation and to avoid a situation in which our military could be surrounded," spokesman for the SNBO information and analysis center Andriy Lysenko said at a Sunday briefing.
That was his commentary on the report that the army left the town of Zhdanivka and several other communities in Eastern Ukraine.
In the Siberian city of Barnaul, unidentified attackers reportedly assaulted a local activist named Artyom Kosaretsky. They also tore up a banner he was holding that said, "Siberia against war." Later police detained Kosaretsky and another activist.
Crowd gathering in Saint Petersburg.
Live stream of march, which now looks like it has about 200 people, here. There are some hecklers. The cameraman calls them "Titushky," the word Ukrainian protesters used for pro-government men, dressed in street-clothes, who would sometimes physically attack Euromaidan protesters.
Our Russian Service reports that Ukraine's Party of Development, a group created from members of the former ruling Party of Regions, will not participate in Ukraine's parliamentary elections. The press service of the party says "millions of voters" will be unable to take part because of the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Our Russian Service talks to Aleksandr Ryklin, an opposition journalist and political activist, about today's march in Moscow.
"Russia today is positioning itself in the world as an aggressor -- and it isn't hiding this, in fact it is doing it openly," he says. "The group in power, which now controls everything, has somehow ceased being ashamed of anything. It now feels like it can do anything.
"We -- I'm speaking now from the point of view of the march organizers -- are counting on the fact that there are still enough people who feel that the political situation is detrimental for the country and nation, who can't agree [with the authorities], who are willing to resist and will march to exhibit their rejection of this kind of power politics."
