Video footage of the cathedral performance that landed three members of Pussy Riot in prison has been banned throughout the female punk rock activist collective’s native Russia.
The video, which has been seen more than 2.4 million times on YouTube, was deemed “extremist” by a Moscow court, which added that websites that fail to remove the clips from their pages may be blocked throughout the country as well.
The protest, performed last winter and posted onto YouTube in February, showed the group’s quite public protest of Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency and the just-as-public support he received from the Russian Orthodox Church.
According to an Associated Press report, the anti-extremist laws Pussy Riot’s video has been ruled as breaking were originally designed “to restrict neo-Nazi and terrorist groups,” though skeptics throughout the country now believe that Putin has used it to censor his administration’s enemies.
That’s something that Pussy Riot member Yekaterine Samutsevich, who was freed in October, believes in full. Speaking shortly after the Thursday ruling, she told the Associated Press “This is clearly coming to censorship, the censorship of political art.”
Samutsevich allowed that she appealed Thursday’s court ruling banning the video, but doesn’t expect for her appeal to be heard and fairly considered.
Photo via Pussy Riot/YouTube