Russia has released the two jailed members of punk band Pussy Riot whose imprisonment prompted a wave of global outrage, with both women immediately vowing to fight injustice in Russian prisons.
Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were freed two months early under a Kremlin-backed amnesty after serving most of their two-year sentences, but slammed the amnesty as just a publicity stunt before the Winter Olympics Russia is hosting in February.
Alyokhina, 25, was quietly whisked away from her prison colony in the city of Nizhny Novgorod while Tolokonnikova, 24, emerged in style and faced a media scrum a few hours later from a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.
Hair perfectly coiffed and wearing fishnet stockings in minus 25C temperatures, Tolokonnikova said her prison time only made her more resolute in opposing President Vladimir Putin's rule.
"I don't consider this time wasted," she said. "I became older, I saw the state from within, I saw this totalitarian machine as it is.
"Russia is built on the model of a penal colony and that is why it is so important to change the penal colonies today to change Russia," she said.
Alyokhina meanwhile used her first interview after her release to slam the amnesty as a mere publicity stunt, and said that she would have preferred to remain in prison but wasn't given a choice.
"I don't think the amnesty is a humanitarian act, I think it's a PR stunt," she told Dozhd television channel. "If I had a choice to refuse (the amnesty), I would have, without a doubt."
The release of the women, who were convicted of hooliganism after staging a "punk prayer" in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour came just three days after the shock freeing of anti-Kremlin tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade behind bars.
Alyokhina was taken away from the prison without saying goodbye to her fellow inmates or speaking with the media and eventually made her way to the offices of local NGO Committee Against Torture to make her first phone calls and discuss violations at the colony.
Still donning prison garb, she said she has no regrets. "I am not sorry, I am proud of what we did," she said, adding that she would like to use the same artistic style in tackling the issue of prisoner rights.
If offered to stage the church stunt again, "we would sing the song to the end", she said. "You have to listen to the whole thing, not just the first verse."
Tolokonnikova added that if the amnesty were wider, then it could be viewed by Western countries as a reason not to boycott the Winter Olympics. "As it stands, I appeal for a boycott, I appeal for honesty, I appeal for not being bought for oil and gas," she said.
