
© Reuters/Maxim Shemetov Russia's former President and prime ministerial candidate Dmitry Medvedev (L) speaks, while President Vladimir Putin listens, during a session of the Russian State Duma in Moscow May 8, 2012.
Moscow - Russia's lower house of parliament confirmed former president Dmitry Medvedev as prime minister on Tuesday, completing a job swap with Vladimir Putin that has sparked protests against the two leaders' grip on power.
The approval vote, comfortably won by Medvedev as Putin looked on, ignored growing concern in the country that keeping power in the hands of the same men who have led Russia for the past four years will bring political and economic stagnation.
Police led away more than 20 people, including two opposition leaders, when they broke up a peaceful protest near the Kremlin hours before the vote, after detaining more than 700 on the previous two days to keep a lid on dissent.
"They just started to grab people and put them in police buses," said Alexander Delfinov, 40, who was held for hours and ordered to appear in court on Friday, facing a fine or up to 15 days in jail.
Activists regrouped later and were chased around central Moscow by police who hemmed them in and detained dozens more.
In Twitter posts from police vans, prominent opposition activist Alexei Navalny and Ksenia Sobchak, a television host who has fallen out with Putin, said they were among those detained - Navalny for the second time in a day.
The United States said it was concerned by arrests and by clashes that erupted at a rally on Sunday, a day before Putin's inauguration as president, when police beat demonstrators with batons and some protesters wielded pieces of metal fencing and flagpoles.
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