Russian punk band Pussy Riot ended their stay in the Olympic city of Sochi on Thursday by posting a video criticizing the Winter Games and President Vladimir Putin.
The band has been filming in Sochi since Sunday and has had violent run-ins with authorities. They have been detained several times, and on Wednesday Cossacks attacked the group with horsewhips as they tried to perform under an Olympic sign.
Band members said they were returning to Moscow to attend the verdicts in a trial of 20 people arrested after clashes on the eve of Putin’s inauguration to a third term in 2012.
The performance-art collective, made up of a loose grouping of feminists and artists, has called for a boycott of the Sochi Olympics, arguing that Putin has exceeded his authority and is restricting human rights.
“The Olympics has turned the police state into a total police state and the authoritarian regime into a totalitarian regime with preventive arrests,” band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said. “The Olympics has created an environment of sweeping violations of human rights in Russia. We are banned from speaking out here.”
Tolokonnikova described the band’s performances throughout the city since Sunday as a form of “active boycott” of the games.
Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina spent nearly two years in prison on charges of hooliganism for their protest in Moscow’s main cathedral in 2012.
Pussy Riot’s video, called “Putin will teach you how to love the motherland”, was posted on YouTube and features a song and footage of the band’s protests. Members told a news conference their treatment in Sochi is symptomatic of dissent being stifled in Russia.
The International Olympic Committee on Thursday condemned the attack on Pussy Riot, saying images it saw were “very unsettling.”
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