A Moscow court has sentenced Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky to a 30-day pre-trial detention after he set fire to the door of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in the capital on Monday.
According to The Moscow Times, the court rejected a request from Pavlensky's lawyer that the artist be released on bail, claiming that he was at risk of absconding. Authorities arrested 31-year-old Pavlensky after he used petrol to set fire to the front door of the FSB's headquarters in central Moscow in the early hours of Monday morning.
The artist has previously nailed his scrotum to the floor of the Red Square to draw attention to what he called the "fatalism of contemporary Russian society," and in 2012 he sewed his mouth shut in solidarity with feminist protest group Pussy Riot. Pavlensky's lawyer told the court that his most recent stunt was "aimed at helping society understand the situation in Russia."
Pavlensky faces charges of vandalism and if convicted he could face up to three years in prison. However, The Moscow Times reports that in a surprise move, he asked the judge to charge him with terrorism rather than vandalism, arguing that others had been charged with terror offences for similar crimes.
Pavlensky reportedly likened his case to that of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov, who in August was sentenced to 20 years in prison by Russian state prosecutors after they found him guilty of organizing a "terrorist group" in Crimea and carrying out arson attacks on pro-Kremlin offices in the region. Sentsov denounced the trial was politically driven and his sentence was decried by human rights groups.
"Based on the logic of the law enforcement authorities, I demand that I be tried for terrorism," Pavlensky said, adding that if he wasn't he would "refuse to carry out these court rituals."
Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who spent 21 months in Russian prison after holding a protest in a Moscow church, was at the courthouse to support Pavlensky. Speaking to AFP, she hailed Pavlensky's recent act the "greatest work of contemporary art for the last few years."
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