Why Pussy Riot were wrong

The three members of Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years each in prison today for hooliganism after performing a ‘punk prayer’ protesting against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral. The sentencing has been denounced as disproportionate and the charges as trumped up, but in last week’s issue of the Spectator, Dennis Sewell asked whether the western media had forgotten that what the band did was still wrong. Sewell first explained that the trio’s treatment by the Russian legal system was indeed unfair:

In case you’re still in doubt about my position, let me remove every scintilla of ambiguity. What has been done to the trio was wrong, wrong and viciously wrong. Nadia, Masha and Katya (first names will do now that they’ve been co-opted into celebrity culture) have been cynically used to intimidate the Russian opposition generally, and I’ll happily throw in that President Putin is a nasty, unscrupulous weasel, too, if it helps get us back to the point.