Meanwhile more than 5,000 people were detained across the country as police sought to quell growing unrest at Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the OVD-Info monitoring group claimed.
Russia’s interior ministry previously said police had arrested roughly 3,500 people, including 1,700 in Moscow, 750 in St Petersburg and 1,061 in other cities.
Father Burdin, of the Resurrection Church in Russia’s western Kostroma region, was arrested shortly after delivering his sermon, according to the Media Zona website.
A police report cited by Media Bona claimed the priest had “committed a public offence aimed at discrediting the Russian armed forces which are conducting a special military operation”.
During his sermons told parishioners of “Russian troops in Ukraine shelling the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and killing citizens of Ukraine – brothers and sisters in Christ”, the police report added.
Father Ioann’s parish last week posted a link to an online anti-war petition.
In an accompanying statement he said: “We, Christians, cannot stand idly by when a brother kills brother, a Christian kills a Christian.
“Let’s not repeat the crimes of those who hailed Hitler’s deeds on Sept 1, 1939.”
Fr Burden, who has been charged with “discrediting” the Russian army, faces a court hearing this week.
Russia’s last protests with a similar number of arrests were in January 2021, when thousands demanded the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny after he was arrested on returning from Germany, where he had been recovering from a nerve agent poisoning.
Mr Navalny had called for protests on Sunday across Russia and the rest of the world against the invasion.
On Sunday, thousands of protesters chanted “No to war!” and “Shame on you!”, according to videos posted on social media by opposition activists and bloggers.
Dozens in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg were shown being detained, with one man shown being beaten on the ground by police in riot gear. A mural in the city showing President Vladimir Putin was also defaced.
Additionally, about 2,000 people attended an anti-war protest in Kazakhstan’s biggest city Almaty, according to videos posted on social media. Reuters was unable to independently verify the posts.
Maria Kuznetsova, OVD-Info’s spokeswoman, speaking by telephone from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, said: “The screws are being fully tightened – essentially we are witnessing military censorship.
”We are seeing rather big protests today, even in Siberian cities where we only rarely saw such numbers of arrests.”
Some Russian state-controlled media carried brief reports about the protests but they did not feature high in news bulletins.
RIA news agency said the Manezhnaya Square in Moscow, next to the Kremlin, had been “liberated” by police.
RIA also showed footage of what looked to be supporters of the Kremlin driving along the embankment in Moscow with Russian flags and displaying the “Z” and “V” markings used by Russian forces on tanks operating in Ukraine.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, said Russian values were being tested by the West, which offered only excessive consumption and the illusion of freedom.
Putin has referred to February 24’s invasion as a “special military operation”.
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