Moscow election committee MosGorIzbirKom has allowed one of the opposition candidates Sergei Mitrokhin to participate in the elections to the City Council after all, upon a preliminary vote recount that proved sufficient for Mitrokhin to run.

The move is a sign that the Kremlin is trying to de-escalate tensions ahead of fresh demonstrations that were sanctioned by Moscow authorities and slated for the weekend of August 3.  

As reported by bne IntelliNews, after 13 opposition politicians and activists were taken off the race to the city council, unsanctioned demonstrations erupted on July 27 that were met with unusual violence from the police and over 1,300 arrests on about 10,000 protesters.

Commentators called the July 27 clash the most violent since the large-scale protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2012 that led to hundreds of arrests after protesters fought with police. Recent polls also confirmed the trend of Moscow being the centre of most active anti-Kremlin sentiment.

The opposition has been holding a series of small scale daily protests in the weeks before that built to a crescendo of a 20,000 strong sanctioned demonstration on July 20. While the July 27 clash with the police was probably designed as a warning to would be demonstrators to stay away or face arrest or a beating, the danger was that a similar unsanctioned protest on August 3 would lead to bigger crowds and more violence that could become a tipping point to radicalise a full blown large-scale protest as seen in Ukraine or Armenia.

Still, by sanctioning a demonstration on August 3 the authorities are risking allowing an even larger crowd than on July 20. But if the demonstration goes off peaceful, the bet is that even a really big demonstration will in effect allow the protestors to blow off steam and will undermine their sense of moral outrage and so de-escalate tensions.

In the meantime ahead of the August 3 demonstrations opposition candidate Ilya Yashin had his arrests extended by 10 days, while opposition leader Alexei Navalny remains in 30-day detention. Several other opposition activists were detained for 7-30 days, such as Vladimir Milov, Ivan Zhdanov, Konstantin Yanauskas, and Yulia Galyamina.