Members of the British group Pet Shop Boys said they admire the courage of the "legendary Russian superstar" Alla Pugacheva. They posted about it on Twitter.
We admire the courage and honesty of the legendary Russian superstar Alla Pugacheva, who condemned Vladimir Putin's war with Ukraine, saying that the war made Russia a 'rogue'.
Post Pugacheva, in which she asked the Ministry of Justice to recognize her as a foreign agent after her husband Maxim Galkin, scored more than 700 thousand likes in a day after publication.
Independent media immediately noted that the pro-Kremlin publications censored the post in their notes and quoted only the phrase about the “foreign agency”, keeping silent about the war. So did TASS , Komsomolskaya Pravda , NTV , Izvestia , Rossiyskaya Gazeta , REN TV and many others.
The press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov, when asked by journalists how the government intends to respond to Pugacheva's statement, traditionally said that this was not the Kremlin's question.
Aleksey Arestovich, adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine, called Pugacheva's speech "a revolt against the Putin system."
Political scientist Kirill Rogov, in a conversation with The Insider, also noted the significance of Pugacheva's act for Russian society.
“Pugacheva does not belong to the space of the Russian opposition, she is somewhere with the people, somewhere in the center. Previously, she did not make any oppositional radical statements, and in this sense she is "one of her own" for the average voter. Her statement is valid. Strikingly, the opposition cannot influence the median voter, the conformist, there is too much enmity between them, they are framed for each other, and this does not work. It works when the statement comes from some authorities from the circle of “friends”. And this is the way in which the middle majority usually splits, that middle stratum that turns this or that ideological group into a majority.
On September 16, the Ministry of Justice recognized Maksim Galkin as a "foreign agent", allegedly receiving funding from Ukraine. Galkin the next day said in social networks that he does not receive any funding from Ukraine, does not sell his opinion and his thoughts, and, communicating with viewers and subscribers, honestly expresses his civic position. “I am not trading in conscience,” he stressed.