Pussy Riot lambastes re-election
THE Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot – whose members served time in prison camps after criticising the Moscow government – is rejecting President Vladimir Putin’s reelection.
“Today (Sunday), Vladimir Putin won Russian elections for the fourth time, so we created this f***ing music band because we didn’t want him to be our president, but then, literally, it became an international movement,” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the group’s frontwoman, said during a show at a Mexican music festival on Sunday.
“And actually, anybody can be a Pussy Riot, all of you can be a Pussy Riot.”
Shortly before taking to the stage at the Vive Latino festival, the group also launched their latest single – “Elections.”
“It’s the election day in Russia (guess who’ll win??)” they wrote on Twitter.
The group also slammed the wave of violence against women gripping Mexico, where, according to the United Nations, more than seven women are killed every day.
A loose feminist collective, Pussy Riot came onto the scene in 2012, the same year as the last Russian presidential election. Members of the group were arrested during a performance of their “punk prayer” openly criticising Putin at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
The sentencing of Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich to two years in prison camps for “hooliganism” and “inciting religious hatred” provoked outrage in the West.
Samutsevich received a suspended sentence, while Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova spent 22 months in jail before being let out under a general amnesty on the eve of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.