he reckoned to add the cities population of 1.5 M to the tally.

That would mean 90% of Belgrade was in the streets that day. As intense the popular support of the protests is, that number is surely a strech. 800k is already quite mind-boggling by the standards of the country… actually, by the standards of any country.

Edit: “The number of protesters present in Belgrade at the protest is disputed: the official government figure provided by MUP was 107,000, an analysis by the Archive of Public Meetings found there were between 275,000 and 325,000 present “with the possibility that the number was even higher,”[499] and Božo Prelević [sr], the former MUP minister, estimated there were at least half a million protesters.[500]” (Wikipedia)

The Reuters number was simply taken from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP), which obviously preferred to keep the number low.

A thread about this is literally pinned on r/europe.

Edit: Also on front page of r/popular with >66k upvotes.

You don’t have to protest at Washington DC.

Since you’re drawing parallels to Serbia - yes, you do want to protest as close to the centre of power as possible, and that’s what Serbs did.

You don’t think the people in Serbia didn’t drive or ride 2-3 hours to get there?

I don’t. The driving distance between Belgrade and Novi Sad, the second largest Serbian city, is ~1 h. And Belgrade by itself already has more than enough population for massive protests, because it has four times the population of Novi Sad and around 1/4 of the population of the entire country. This degree of centralisation and physical proximity is completely incomparable to US. US geography significantly diffuses the power of protests.

Also the Serbian protests have been initiated and are led by students who in general do not drive around much, it’s safe to assume most don’t have their own cars, etc. IIRC, some of those who participated in the yesterday protest were brought by buses to Belgrade, which was organised ahead of time by the protesters.

The estimates for the Belgrade protest go as far as 800k participants.

Serbia has a population of 6.6 million.