Unable to push new release/ branches as we need to prevent direct push to existing release/ branches!

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We have the branch pattern release/ marked as protected to ensure all changes to an existing release branch must have a merge request (with appropriate approvals) before push.

However this is stopping our developers from remotely creating (eg via IntelliJ) new release branches because they are protected!

This was never an issue previously in Bitbucket as the protection only applied to existing branches.

How is this resolved in GITLab process please?