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Pussy Riot target Russian oil industry in new music video
Pussy Riot target Russian oil industry in new music video
(about 5 hours later)
Four members of Pussy Riot dance on an oil pipeline in garish masks, compare Vladimir Putin to an "ayatollah in Iran" and attack his allies in Russia's rich energy sector, in a new music video released online.
The Russian punks Pussy Riot have released a new video in which they appear dancing on an oil pipeline in garish masks, and compare Vladimir Putin to an "ayatollah in Iran" while attacking his allies in Russia's rich energy sector.
In their first performance in almost a year, the feminist punk protest collective also accuse Putin of being homophobic after passage of what is widely seen as anti-gay legislation in Russia.
In their first performance in almost a year, the band also accuse Putin of being homophobic after passage of anti-gay legislation. Like a Red Prison is one of Pussy Riot's few performances since a protest last year won global fame for the band members but led to three of them being jailed. The band say they want to draw attention to Putin's practice of allowing only close allies to share in the vast proceeds generated by the Russian energy industry. Reuters Moscow
Like a Red Prison is one of Pussy Riot's few performances since an anti-Putin protest in a Russian Orthodox church last year won global fame for the band members but led to three of them being jailed.
In the video, posted on YouTube, one of the women pours what appears to be oil over a large portrait of Igor Sechin, head of the state oil firm Rosneft and a close Putin ally. Another clutches a microphone while a third brandishes a guitar as they clamber on to the roof of a petrol station.
In another scene, band members climb up a gas flare. At times they are watched by mystified workers in hardhats as they writhe to the music.
The aim of the video, the band explains, is to draw attention to what they say is Putin's practice of allowing only close allies to share in the vast proceeds generated by the Russian energy industry. Rosneft declined comment.
The women also reprise their criticism of Putin's close ties with the Russian Orthodox church. "Your president is like an ayatollah in Iran and your church is like in the United Arab Emirates," they chant, without explaining the reference to the UAE.
They condemn "homophobic vermin" in Russia and denounce Putin as a homophobe, after the president signed into law a ban on spreading gay "propaganda" among minors. Russian officials deny that the law is homophobic.
Pussy Riot and other opposition activists such as the anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who is mentioned in the video and is on trial on theft charges, accuse Putin of cracking down on dissent since returning to the presidency in May last year after protests against his 13-year rule. The Kremlin denies there has been a clampdown.
Last August three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" over their "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral in February 2012. Yekaterina Samutsevich was freed last October but Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who wrote some of the lyrics for the new video, are still in a prison colony.
The trial and punishment of the women angered many western governments, and they won support from international celebrities such as Madonna and Sir Paul McCartney. But their case divided Russians. Many people, liberals and conservatives alike, disapproved of the protest because it took place in a church, but fewer thought they deserved such a touch sentence, opinion polls showed.
