MOSCOW: Around 50,000 people marched through central Moscow on Saturday in protest at Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a day before the Crimean peninsula votes on switching to Kremlin rule.

Waving Ukrainian and Russian flags and adopting the chants of Ukraine’s popular uprising, prominent and ordinary Russians urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull troops back from ex-Soviet Ukraine.

Marchers carried placards reading “Putin, get out of Ukraine” and others comparing Kremlin’s decision to send troops to Crimea with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland as Europe rushed headlong into World War II.

A group of demonstrators held a banner reading: “Take the Russian troops home,” while one protester carried a copy of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Some shouted the war-time battle cry of Ukrainian nationalists that has become the most famous chant of the Kiev uprising that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych -- “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!” Members of anti-Kremlin punk Pussy Riot compared Russia’s invasion of Crimea that plunged the country into a Cold-War style confrontation with the West to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.—AFP