Members of Pussy Riot punk band, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, freed early at the end of 2013 from their two-year jail terms for hooliganism for their ‘punk prayer’ protest action in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in February 2012, have restated their desire to replace Vladimir Putin’s regime with a more tolerant Russian leadership, the Guardian reports.
The two women also said that they were going to set up a human rights organisation to help Russian prisoners, out of concern for fellow inmates who had helped them collect information and testify to human rights observers about the harsh conditions in Russian prisons.