Nadya, a member of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot, has been jailed since 2012, when the group was arrested for playing what the L.A. Times called, a “provocative song”, in a Russian cathedral. The group said they wanted to call attention to Russian government censorship, and the relationship between Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Nadya and another band member, Maria Alyokhina, still have five months to serve on a two-year sentence for “hooliganism motivated by racial hatred.”
Russian law stipulates that families of prisoners must be notified of where their loved ones have been imprisoned, and Nadya’s family says they have had no information of her location since she began a hunger strike at a prison in Mordovia.“There’s no proof she’s alive,” Nadya’s father told Buzzfeed. “We don’t know the state of her health. Is she sick? Has she been beaten?”