On the evening of July 16, Moscow residents protested for the third day straight to demand that opposition candidates be permitted to register for September’s Moscow City Duma elections. The protest began with approximately 100 people standing in a steady downpour and reached about 1,000 participants at its peak. Multiple prominent opposition activists were told earlier in the day that their candidacy applications had been rejected, supposedly because too many of the signatures they collected from voters could not be verified. Several of those candidates, including Lyubov Sobol, Konstantin Jankauskas, and Ivan Zhdanov, gave speeches to the crowd. While police officers had made nearly 40 arrests on the first day of the protests, they did not interfere in the July 15 and July 16 demonstrations.

Evgeny Feldman for Meduza