A Moscow court has sentenced five members of Pussy Riot, the activist punk collective, to prison sentences ranging from 8 to 13 years, on charges of spreading “fakes” about the Russian military via their videos and performances, the Russian state-owned news agency Tass reported on Monday (15 September).
Maria (Masha) Alekhina, Olga Borisova, Diana Burkot, Alina Petrova and Taso Pletner were sentenced in absentia by a judge identified on the website of the Basmanny District Court as Yevgenia Nikolaeva. A prosecutor had requested even longer sentences. According to Tass, Alekhina and Pletner were sentenced to 13 and 11 years, respectively, in a penal colony, while the three other defendants got eight years each.
Alekhina, Borisova, Burkot and Pletner were found guilty of “spreading knowingly false information containing data about the deployment of the Russian Armed Forces”, according to an article of Russia’s criminal code that has been used to quash protest against the war, especially on social media.
The charges against the four were based on a video posted on YouTube in December 2022 called “Mama, Don’t Watch TV (Anti-War Song)”, which opens with the words “the howls of Mariupol”, referring to the city in the Donetsk region that Russia destroyed and then illegally annexed following the launch of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The song also refers to Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv that was the site of an early massacre during the invasion and calls out the West for its complicity.
Alekhina was also charged, along with Pletner and Petrova, for an April 2024 performance in Munich, Germany, that addressed the destruction of Mariupol. The performance included one of them urinating on a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pussy Riot members have fled Russia by various means—Alekhina escaped in 2022 with the help of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.
Alekhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in prison for their 2012 punk prayer against Putin at Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, in which they implored the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Putin and condemned Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tolokonnikova was arrested in absentia in 2023 and subsequently added to Russia’s international wanted list, and Pyotr Verzilov, another founding member of Pussy Riot, was added to the government’s list of terrorists after joining the Ukrainian military.
Burkot addressed Monday’s verdict in a statement distributed by the group’s spokesperson.
“I am the author of the music, I perform the ‘slogans-chants’, I am acting in the video, and I also directed the editing. So I stand by every single word and my anti-war stance is clear,” she said. “The paradox is that rapists and murderers in Russia get three to four years, sometimes spending less than a year in prison before signing a military contract, killing Ukrainians and then they return freely into society, with PTSD, and may end up back in prison for yet another killing. Is this cycle of violence the new norm in Russia? Meanwhile, activists receive monstrous sentences for their opinions.”
Burkot called the Russian government “a textbook example of patriarchy” and called on people around the world to practise daily activism to “overcome the crisis of democracy”. She made further comments on her Instagram.
According to Tass, Burkot’s father had testified as a witness in the court saying he “opposed his daughter’s political views”. Earlier reports by Russian-language human rights and opposition media have documented searches conducted against the relatives still in Russia of Pussy Riot members who have been forced to flee the country.