A Russian fan’s appreciation for Rammstein is being used against him as a political weapon in his native country.
According to Amnesty International, Andrei Borovikov faces up to three years in a “high security penal colony” after sharing Rammstein’s “Pussy” music video on the Russian social network VKontakte in 2014. The extremely NSFW clip debuted on a pornographic website in 2009.
Borovikov is an environmental activist and former coordinator for anti-Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In August of last year, Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent, forcing a month-long stay in a Berlin hospital. He would later accuse Vladimir Putin of being responsible for the poisoning, and is currently serving a two-and-a-half year sentence in a corrective labour colony, where he is reportedly being tortured.
A mere month after Navalny was poisoned, Borovikov just so happened to suddenly find himself charged with “production and distribution of pornography” for having shared the video six years prior.
The assumption, according to Amnesty International Moscow Office Director Natalia Zviagina, is that the trumped-up charge is merely being used as an excuse to stop him from continuing to combat Putin’s fascistic regime:
“The case against Andrei Borovikov is utterly absurd. It is blatantly obvious that he is being punished solely for his activism, not his musical taste.
“This is not the first time the Russian authorities have used an overbroad definition of ‘pornography’ as a pretext for locking up their critics. Earlier this month, artist and feminist activist Yulia Tsvetkova stood trial on pornography charges over her drawings of women’s bodies – it is astonishing that cases like this even make it to court.
“The prosecution of Andrei Borovikov is a mockery of justice, and we call for all charges against him to be dropped. The Russian authorities should be focusing on turning around the spiralling human rights crisis they have created, not devising ludicrous new ways of prosecuting and silencing their critics.”
The Lomonosovsky District Court is scheduled to render a verdict tomorrow, Thursday, April 29.
You can read Amnesty International’s entire report here.