To voice its support of a protest held in Moscow’s Manezhka Square earlier today, the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot is going through a witch phase. It’s doing so in the form of a new video, “Witches Of Pussy Riot Clean Manezhka,” the first since members of the group were whipped and detained by police performing the song “Putin Will Teach You To Love The Motherland” in Sochi in February. The video plays off of the Kremlin’s tactic of framing dissidents as “devils and witches,” according to a statement, embracing the image by depicting the women dressing up in vampy clothes and flying away on broomsticks after sweeping the protest site at Manezhka Square, with lyrics repeating the words “Clean. Fair. Word. Deed.”
Tonight’s protest was organized after Oleg Navalny, brother of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail in a trial that was deliberately sped up to discourage protests. The BBC reports that more than 2,000 people attended the protest just a few hours ago, with hundreds carried off by police as they broke up the crowd. Alexei Navalny was among those arrested; he was picked up by police and returned to his home, where he has been on house arrest since February.