Pussy Riot Girls Sentenced to Two Years

Developing....

UPDATE From WSJ live blog:

9:10 amby Alexander Kolyandr
After the sentence was announced, the husband of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova looked visibly distressed. Opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny said: “It’s the end of the judicial system in Russia.”

9:04 amby Paul
Crowds outside the court are chanting "Shame!" as police haul off some protesters. Also protesters out supporting Orthodox Church.

9:03 amby Jeanne
Judge says sentence should be a "caution to others," according to people tweeting in the courtroom.

9:01 amby Alexander Kolyandr
The Pussy Riot members smiled as the sentence was read.

Daniel McAdams puts some meat to my suspicions that Pussy Riot is come type of CIA front:

They do have some interesting backers in addition to the usual Western entertainers, however. As is well-documented, PR has open connections to the National Endowment for Democracy (surprise). Oksana Chelysheva, listed as the head of the group's support campaign, also happens to have been "Deputy Executive Director" of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, a strange pro-extremist outfit which is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. Chelysheva also has other extensive US government ties through her leadership roles in other NED and George Soros-funded outfits like the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum and the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum.

Does Chelysheva funnel State Department money to the members of Pussy Riot through these front groups? It would not be the first time such support is covertly given to an organization seen as undermining a foreign leader viewed as out of favor with Washington....

Also seldom reported is what the women actually said while trespassing in the altar area of the church. Falsely reported as a "punk prayer to the Virgin Mary," the poem they recited was in fact grotesquely scatological and objectively disrespectful and blasphemous. It was not a prayer of any sort, and in fact was a kind of a vulgar parody of the beliefs and rituals of believers.

Does this sound like a prayer in any meaning of the word:

Holy shit, shit, Lord's shit!
Holy shit, shit, Lord's shit!
St. Maria, Virgin, become a feminist...
Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Bitch, you better believed in God

Are they feminists? Do they have a philosophy? Politics? It is debatable. The origins of the group are in the strange collective known as "Voina," which means "war" in Russian. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the defendants in the current case, was an active member of the group Voina whose actions which leave one scratching his head as to the real purpose of the group.