Police in the Kaliningrad region have mistaken a marathon for a gay pride parade.

Several athletes gathered in the town center of Sovetsk on Saturday for the run, but were approached by police, who detained some of them, including teenagers.

Police later explained they had been falsely tipped-off about a planned but illegal gay pride march in the town.

Organizing pride parades has long been a big problem among activists in Russia’s gay community.

In Moscow, they have been unsuccessfully applying for permission to hold a parade for several years – with former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov branding them "satanic" on one occasion.

With Luzhkov replaced by Sergey Sobyanin, the LGBT community hoped for change, but the new mayor deemed such events in the capital to be “unnecessary.”

The bans have always been warmly supported by the Russian Orthodox Church, with its officials supporting what they say is the authorities' right to ban any propaganda based on its potential moral damage to the people.

In July 2011, Russia paid 30,000 euros in compensation to gay activists over its decision to ban so-called pride marches.

The fine was issued by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the decision to repeatedly ban gay pride parades in 2006, 2007 and 2008 was unlawful.

The European ruling, however, did not help: the last attempted gay pride effort was dispersed by police in Moscow in May of 2011. More than 60 people, both supporters of LGBT rights and their opponents, were detained.