A court in Switzerland has fined three members of Russia's Pussy Riot protest group for attempting to paint anti-war graffiti on the curb of a road in Bern.
Pussy Riot member Taso Pletner tweeted on August 31 that she and her two colleagues, Maria Alyokhina and Lyusya Shtein, were ordered to pay 400 Swiss francs ($410) each.
The trio was briefly detained by Bern police on August 30 while they were trying to paint graffiti protesting Russian's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
In August 2021, Alyokhina and Shtein were handed parole-like sentences in Russia for calling on people to participate in unsanctioned rallies to support jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny after he was arrested at a Moscow airport upon his return from Germany, where he was convalescing from a poison attack.
In April this year, the two cut off electronic bracelets they were forced to wear and managed to flee Russia. Alyokhina, Shtein, and other members of the protest group have been known as ardent critics of Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine.
Last week, the Russian Embassy in Switzerland published a statement saying that Pussy Riot's actions criticizing the Kremlin are illegal both in Switzerland and Russia.
Pussy Riot came to prominence in 2012 after three of its members were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for a stunt in which they burst into Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral and sang a "punk prayer" against Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time and campaigning for his subsequent return to the Kremlin.
Alyokhina and bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova had almost completed serving their two-year prison sentences when they were freed in December 2013 under an amnesty. The two have dismissed the move as a propaganda stunt by Putin to improve his image ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics that were held in the Russian resort city of Sochi.