Truncheon-wielding Russian police who broke up opposition protests at the weekend overreacted, a Kremlin spokesman said today.
But the spokesman said the scale of the clashes in Moscow and Russia's second city of St Petersburg had been blown out of proportion by foreign media.
Riot police detained hundreds of protesters, including chess champion Garry Kasparov, who tried to hold a banned march in Moscow on Saturday. Police beat and kicked anti-Kremlin protesters in St Petersburg the next day.
Germany, holder of the rotating European Union presidency, called the police action unacceptable and the United States expressed concern over what it called heavy-handed policing.
A deputy Kremlin spokesman said: "I think some overreaction really took place . . . but their main role was to ensure law and order on the streets.
"Everybody accepts these actions were quite limited . . . [in terms of] the number of participants. But of course, the very fact of these actions . . . draws extreme attention from foreign media. And in the foreign media, a certain exaggeration took place, really," he said.