Two freed members of anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot today met in Siberia for the first time since their release, discussing plans to set up a new rights group to help Russian prisoners.
Maria Alyokhina, who had been serving her sentence at a prison colony in the central city of Nizhny Novgorod, flew into the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk to meet up with band mate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was released from a prison hospital.
Alyokhina, 25, and Tolokonnikova, 24, were released two months early under a Kremlin-backed amnesty after serving most of their two-year sentences for staging a protest performance against Putin in an Orthodox cathedral in Moscow in February 2012.
Their release was welcomed today by another famous prisoner who was freed -- Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
"Dear girls! I know that the past months were utter hell for you," wrote the former chief of the Yukos oil company who received a pardon from President Vladimir Putin last week and was put on a plane to Berlin straight away.
"I am happy to learn that the torture unworthy of a European country in the 21st century has come to an end," he said.
Tolokonnikova's husband Pyotr Verzilov told AFP the two women had discussed plans to create "a fully fledged organisation to help inmates."
The two punk rockers remained defiant after their release, denouncing their amnesty as a "PR stunt" and vowing to fight injustice in Russian prisons.
"In my last penal colony I had friends who told rights activists about their conditions, and I will do everything in my power so that they do not come under pressure," the curly-haired Alyokhina said in televised remarks in Krasnoyarsk.
The young women, both of whom have small children, earlier today embraced at Krasnoyarsk airport surrounded by a crowd of journalists.
Showing she had lost none of her fighting spirit, Tolokonnikova said the chief of the prison service in Mordovia, where she had served most of her sentence, should be removed from his post over what she said were numerous violations.
"Mordovia will receive its just deserts. Get ready," she said on Twitter.
The two women are expected to hold a news conference in Moscow on Friday.
