Russia jails women for erotic memorial dance

THREE women have been jailed in Russia for filming themselves performing an “erotic” dance in front of a World War 2 memorial.

Student Margarita Radetskaya, 19, was put behind bars for 15 days, while Yana Kutakova, 24, and Yekaterina Shcherbedinskaya, 26, were given a 10-day sentence each.

The trio were prosecuted for minor hooliganism after putting a video online of themselves doing what prosecutors called an “erotic and sexual twerk dance” in front of the Soviet-era Malaya Zemlya memorial near Novorossiysk on the Black Sea coast.

The women apparently filmed the video – set to the song F**k You Tonite by Jamaican musician Aidonia – to promote a local dance club called Art Dance.

Two other dancers from the video received fines, and the parents of the sixth, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, were charged with failing in their duties to maintain and bring up a minor. The mother was also fined for failing to provide measures to ensure the spiritual and moral development of a child.

Prosecutors said they had taken up the case to protect a monument of military history and culture. The Novaya Zemlya monument marks the scene of a beachhead secured by Red Army marines during Nazi occupation of the area in 1943.

Victory in World War 2 is of totemic significance in Russia, and patriotic feelings are running high ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war on May 9, to be marked by a military parade.

There has been a series of prosecutions in recent years of people urinating on or otherwise extinguishing eternal flames at war memorials in Russia.

Another scandal earlier this month involved a group of teens in leotards and minis being filmed performed a twerking dance called “The Bees and Winnie Pooh” in Orenburg. – The Telegraph