Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokina fled Russia disguised as a foodie – The Observer

Wearing Delivery To dodge the police and without a mobile phone. This is how Maria Alyokhina, one of the activists of the Pussy Riot squad, managed to escape from Russia towards Lithuania. The escape story was told on Tuesday by the New York Times.

Pussy Riot has starred in several films Offers Against the regime of Vladimir Putin was arrested several times by the opposition of the President of Russia. By the way, the New York Times reports that Maria Alokina had to serve a two-year prison sentence in After a 2012 protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. And since last summer, she has been arrested six more times.

In April of this year, when Putin intensified the crackdown on dissent, the authorities announced that Maria Alyokhina’s house arrest would be replaced by a 21-day prison sentence. It was then that the activist decided to leave Russia: Disguised as a food courier to deceive the police, Who was watching the apartment in which he lived in Moscow. The cell phone was left to avoid any surveillance.

A friend took her to the Belarus border and it took a week to get to Lithuania. Only on the third attempt did he manage to cross the border. “I still don’t quite understand what you did”, the 33-year-old activist admitted in an interview with the New York Times from Vilnius. But he did not hide his satisfaction: “I was glad that I did, because it was such an unpredictable thing.”

Alyokhina and colleagues from Pussy Riot, some of whom have also recently escaped, are preparing for a fundraising tour of Ukraine, starting May 12. In these shows, the activist will wear black boots that he used to flee Russia when she was in prison.

In the interview, Ilyukhina sharply criticized the Russian invasion. “I don’t think Russia has the right to continue to exist,” he said. Even before the invasion, the activist said, “there were doubts” about how united the homeland was, as well as about what the “values” were. And on Pussy Riot, he stressed that the Russian authorities are afraid “because they can’t control it.”