Pussy Riot’s new anti-Putin music video uses footage from Cossack Militia beatings

Pussy Riot released the music video for their song ‘Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland’ yesterday, which uses footage from a video where members of the band were whipped, sprayed in the face, struck and thrown to the ground by Cossack militia.

The footage came after the band attempted to stage a protest at the Sochi Games over anti-gay laws in Russia.

The original video was posted by the Associated Press. It shows the band members don their balaclavas and gas masks, and attempt to being singing before they are swiftly attacked by the security staff.

Two members of the group said they had already been arrested in Sochi earlier this week.

In August, Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich, were jailed for two years for staging an anti-Vladimir Putin protest at a major Moscow cathedral, with a song that mentioned the country’s persecuted LGBT citizens in a Moscow cathedral on 21 February 2012.

In the wake of the scandal caused by the Pussy Riot last year, another law was passed by the State Duma to criminalise insulting people’s religious feelings.

• Nov 29 2023

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