Pussy Riot

Activists worry that things will only get worse as Russian President Vladimir Putin centers anti-queer persecution in his re-election campaign.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister claims a prisoner swap is still possible.

Police ordered the studio to turn off power while the feminist punk band recorded a video.

The Russian band and activist group Pussy Riot has returned with an EP titled “xxx” featuring songs taking aim at Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

SOCHI, Russia — Russian punk group Pussy Riot burst onto the Olympic scene Tuesday when two of its members were picked up by police in host city Sochi — and then ran away defiant down a rain-soaked street a few hours later, shouting and wearing their trademark garish balaclavas.

KRASNOYARSK, Russia — The last two imprisoned members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot walked free Monday, criticizing the amnesty measure that released them as a publicity stunt, with one calling for a boycott of the Winter Olympics to protest Russia’s human rights record.

American conservative groups haven’t just praised Russia’s crackdown on gays. Working through several channels, American anti-gay activists quietly provided intellectual backing and international support that directly and indirectly fueled the resurgent anti-gay movement in Russia and in other former Soviet states like Lithuania, Moldova and Ukraine.

In his syndicated column Tuesday, conservative activist Pat Buchanan defends Russian president Vladimir Putin’s persecution of gay people and political prosecution of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, saying that Putin is just “trying to re-establish the Orthodox Church as the moral compass of the nation it had been for 1,000 years before Russia fell captive to the atheistic and pagan ideology of Marxism.”

MOSCOW — Pop icon Madonna is being sued for more than $10 million by Russian activists who claimed they were offended by her support for gay rights during a recent concert in St. Petersburg, Russia.