The four members of Russian protest punk group Pussy Riot responsible for Sunday’s World Cup final pitch invasion in Moscow have each been sentenced to 15 days “administrative detention.”
The sentences, announced by one of the four, Pyotr Verzilov, the civil law partner of Pussy Riot co-founder Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, start immediately.
Writing on Facebook, Verzilov — who holds dual Russian and Canadian citizenship — said the three women involved had been sent to one Moscow detention center and he to another.
The four, who donned Soviet-era police uniforms for their pitch invasion, had also been banned from attending “official sports events” for three years, he added.
Their arrests Sunday, following incredible scenes at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium after France had already established a 2-1 lead over Croatian, included one of the female protesters high-fiving with French soccer star Kylian Mbappe.
Pussy Riot said the protest was held to call for the release of political prisoners — including Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who Tuesday entered the 65th day of a hunger strike over the same issue — the end of illegal detentions at political rallies and the cessation of the policing of political views on Russian social media platforms.
Although the court ruling of 15 days’ detention is a relatively light punishment compared with the two-year prison sentences handed down to Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina for staging a “punk protest” in a Moscow cathedral in 2012, there are some in Russia who believe a stricter response is necessary: following their arrest, a video has reportedly surfaced of a Moscow police colonel “aggressively” telling the four that he regretted the pitch invasion had not taken place in 1937 — a reference to the deadliest year of Stalin’s repressions, when huge swaths of the military, bureaucracy and intelligentsia were arrested and executed.
