Into The Music
Pussy Riot showed up at Ubiquiti’s Manhattan office on Friday with a message that was impossible to ignore: stop selling hardware that the Russian military is using to kill people.
The activist collective, which has spent years working at the intersection of art and resistance, staged the protest to draw attention to what they describe as Ubiquiti’s direct role in enabling Russian war crimes in Ukraine. In a video statement, Pussy Riot member Nadya laid out the specific case: after Starlink was disabled for Russian forces, Ubiquiti’s networking hardware emerged as a preferred communications solution on the front line, with Russian soldiers using the equipment to relay commands across distances of up to 15 kilometers.
“There are thousands of documented cases of war crimes by the Russian army,” Pussy Riot said in a statement. “Targeting civilians, killing POWs, raping women and prisoners, mass graves. The list goes on.”
The group came with three demands: that Ubiquiti obey U.S. sanctions, publicly acknowledge the use of their equipment by the Russian military, and actively work with Ukraine to stop that use. It was a specific, concrete ask. Not theater. Not performance art in the abstract. A targeted intervention aimed at a company that, in Pussy Riot’s framing, is not just indifferent to what its products are being used for but is profiting from it.
The response from Ubiquiti was, to put it generously, a masterclass in corporate tone-deafness. Within hours of the protest, Square, Ubiquiti’s partner payment company, deactivated the account that Pussy Riot uses to sell merchandise at their shows. Pussy Riot did not miss the implication. “Going after Russian feminist activists in exile, but not after Russian war criminals,” they wrote on social media. “Cringe.”
There is something deeply revealing about that move. A company that cannot be bothered to engage with serious questions about how its hardware is being deployed on an active battlefield found the bandwidth to cancel a band’s t-shirt account. The priorities speak for themselves.
Pussy Riot has been doing this kind of work for over a decade, ever since their 2012 performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour landed several members in prison on charges of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” Their methods have evolved but their core approach has not: find the target, name it explicitly, and make the confrontation as public and specific as possible. There is no ambiguity in what they asked of Ubiquiti. There is no ambiguity in how Ubiquiti responded.
The situation in Ukraine continues to involve front-line communication systems that depend on hardware built by American companies. The question of corporate accountability in wartime is not abstract, and Pussy Riot is not asking abstract questions. They are asking a networking company why it has not done more to ensure that its equipment is not being used to coordinate attacks on civilian populations.
Whether Ubiquiti responds with anything more substantive than a canceled merch account remains to be seen. But the record of this confrontation is now public.
This is what it looks like when artists understand their platform as something more than promotion! Caetano Veloso was arrested by the military dictatorship in Brazil, exiled , and he never stopped using his art as a form of witness. Pussy Riot has been doing this since the beginning, putting their bodies in the way of things they believe are wrong. The occupation of a corporate headquarters is itself a kind of performance, no? I love how the line between their music and their activism has always been completely blurred. That is the tradition.
The structural logic of this action is interesting to me , Pussy Riot has always understood that the message requires a form that enacts it, not just describes it. Occupying the physical space of a company that profits from hardware used in atrocities is a kind of contrapuntal move: the statement and the action are in dialogue with each other, each intensifying the other’s meaning. The question of whether it works as advocacy is separate from whether it works as art. And I think it works as both.