Reporters detained at Moscow protest by soldiers' wives: AFP

Russian police on Saturday released about 20 reporters, including an AFP journalist, who had been detained at a protest in Moscow by  wives of men mobilised to fight in Ukraine.

The women have staged rare protests outside the Kremlin walls for weeks -- an uncomfortable movement for the authorities that has so far not been put down.

Police had detained the group of  Russian and foreign reporters -- all men -- and took them to a police station earlier on Saturday.

The group had been arrested outside Red Square as they covered and filmed the women, who are demanding their partners be brought home from Ukraine.

Video footage showed police bringing reporters wearing yellow press vests to police vans.

The reporters, including the AFP journalist, were released several hours later.

The wives of mobilised men have been staging protests outside the Kremlin walls every weekend for weeks, symbolically bringing red flowers to a tomb of an unknown soldier.

While Moscow has orchestrated a huge crackdown on dissent at home, the women's movement has so far gone unpunished.

The AFP journalist who was detained said around 40 people took part in the protest.

An online live stream posted by the women's group showed participants walking together through central Moscow.

"We are here as the women who need their husbands," said one of the women in the live stream.

She said they will "get creative" should authorities try to put down their protest.

The movement is extremely sensitive for authorities, who appear unwilling to spread more anger by arresting women.

It has grown out of the anger of relatives of reservists sent to Ukraine under President Vladimir Putin's September 2022 mobilisation decree.

State media have ignored the movement.

The topic is especially uncomfortable for the Kremlin ahead of the March presidential election, in which Putin is running for a fifth Kremlin term, more than two years after launching the Ukraine offensive.

According to independent media, there were also several arrests of protest participants outside the headquarters for Putin's candidacy in the election.

Participants noted that police only arrested men.

Another woman in the video live stream said the protest was aimed at showing Russians living as normal during the Ukraine conflict "that there is another part of society that suffers all the time."

According to Putin, 244,000 out of 617,000 of Moscow's forces in Ukraine are mobilised men.

The Kremlin's mobilisation drive in 2022 led to an exodus of men abroad.