A Russian court has sentenced three members of a popular street band to jail after they performed antiwar and anti-Kremlin songs in St. Petersburg, as Moscow continues to crack down on open displays of dissent against its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On Thursday, a district court sentenced Diana Loginova, the lead singer of Stoptime who goes by the stage name of Naoko, and Vladislav Leontyev, the band’s drummer, to 13 days of administrative detention. Aleksandr Orlov, the guitarist, was sentenced to 12 days. They were found guilty of organizing a concert that obstructed pedestrian access to a subway station.
The band members were detained on Wednesday and denied the charges, pointing out that no one had complained that they made it difficult to enter the station.
Court records showed that another case was opened against Ms. Loginova, 18, for allegedly discrediting the Russian Army. If she is found guilty, she could be fined.
The number of subscribers to the band’s Telegram channel has surged this week, to 37,000 on Friday from 11,000 on Monday. In its last post on the social media app, Stoptime said it would not comment on the situation and confirmed all future performances were suspended.
To many in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the band’s arrest may have seemed inevitable. The Russian authorities have effectively outlawed open opposition to the government and threatened perpetrators with arrest.
Yet for months, Stoptime had played songs widely associated with the anti-Kremlin and antiwar opposition.
On Monday, at the band’s last concert before the members were arrested, a crowd of about 100 people watched them perform and loudly sang along on a busy pedestrian street in the city center. Many were dedicated fans and members of the band’s channel on Telegram, where they would announce their shows a few hours beforehand.
“They are doing a dangerous thing,” said Innokentiy Molchanov, 17, who has been a regular concertgoer. “But they are important because at least someone should say the truth.”
The band displayed a QR code and a phone number linked to its bank account for donations taped to the synthesizer. A young man walked around with a pink hat collecting cash donations. Many of the spectators, most of them young, knew one another and saw themselves as part of a community of fans.
“I have been coming to almost every concert,” said Nataliya, 19, who works at a kindergarten and declined to give her last name, fearing government repercussions.
“People who gather here cannot express their thoughts openly, and you feel warmth and support, something that you cannot feel anywhere else,” she added.
Stoptime’s repertoire included songs by popular antiwar musicians who have gone into exile after publicly opposing the Kremlin. One by Noize MC, a Russian rapper, for example, alluded to corruption by President Vladimir V. Putin and ridiculed justifications used by state propaganda in support of the invasion of Ukraine. In May, the song was banned by a Russian court as extremist.
The band also performed a song by Pornofilmy, a Russian punk band, that included the refrain “Uncle Volodya, tighten up our screws,” a veiled reference to Mr. Putin. Volodya is a diminutive form of the name Vladimir.
Songs by Monetochka and Zemfira, two of Russia’s most popular singers who went into exile after being designated “foreign agents” by the Russian government for opposing the war in Ukraine, were on the set list, too.
For weeks, Stoptime’s concerts went largely unnoticed. The group was one of many street bands that performed every night in major squares and intersections along St. Petersburg’s Nevskiy Prospekt, the city’s main thoroughfare.
But as people began posting footage of the performances online, the band attracted the attention of Russia’s pro-war nationalists. At the end of August, police officers detained the band members for violating the law that prohibits playing loud songs at night. They were released hours later.
But this fall, as their popularity grew, so did their problems. Conservative commentators began to criticize their performances and openly called for their arrests.
“They’re jumping around — they like the little tune, and the rhymes are easy to memorize,” Marina Akhmedova, a pro-Kremlin journalist and activist, wrote on Monday in a post on Telegram. “That’s all there is to it. They think they’re cool — protesting against the big man in the center of St. Petersburg.”
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
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