Into The Music
Pussy Riot walked into the Manhattan headquarters of Ubiquiti on Friday and did what they have always done: made noise in a place that preferred silence.
The protest, staged by co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova and other members of the collective, targeted the American networking company over allegations that its equipment has been used by the Russian military on the front lines in Ukraine. The group brought footage sourced from Russian military Telegram channels showing soldiers using Ubiquiti Wi-Fi bridges, alongside guides circulating among troops on how to deploy them. Their demand was straightforward: Ubiquiti should acknowledge what its products are being used for, comply fully with US sanctions, and work with Ukraine to stop the supply chain enabling it.
The accusation is specific. According to Pussy Riot, after Russia lost reliable access to Starlink terminals in Ukraine, Ubiquiti hardware became a go-to alternative for military communications in the field. If accurate, that is not an abstraction. That is battlefield infrastructure. Tolokonnikova called it a contribution to thousands of documented war crimes.
Ubiquiti did not respond publicly to requests for comment. What did happen, according to the group, was that Square, a payment processor partnered with Ubiquiti, deactivated the account Pussy Riot uses to sell merchandise at events. The timing, just hours after the protest, prompted a pointed response from Tolokonnikova: “Going after Russian feminist activists in exile, but not after Russian war criminals. Cringe.”
It is worth pausing on that reaction. A tech company’s payment partner moves swiftly against activists who staged a peaceful demonstration, while the underlying accusation, that the company’s equipment is being used to facilitate war crimes, generates no public response. That asymmetry says something about which kinds of disruption the industry finds intolerable.
Pussy Riot has been doing this for over a decade. The collective that got arrested in a Moscow cathedral in 2012 for a protest song about Vladimir Putin is still standing. They have been designated as extremists by the Russian government, which now poses genuine danger to anyone connected to them inside Russia. They keep going anyway.
The Ubiquiti protest fits a pattern that has become more urgent since the full-scale invasion began in 2024. Pussy Riot has spent much of the past two years mapping the ways Western technology companies continue to operate in grey zones around sanctions, sometimes directly, sometimes through distribution channels that look the other way. This is not theoretical activism. It is investigative protest.
Whether Ubiquiti faces any serious consequence remains to be seen. American tech companies have navigated around sanction compliance issues before with limited accountability. But the footage and documentation Pussy Riot presented is not going away, and their track record of making these stories stick is better than most people expect.
The collective is also scheduled to present “Pussy Riot: Riot Days” at the inaugural Bulletproof Festival in East London this June, one of the few UK festival exclusives on their calendar. That show will look different after this week.
I’ll be honest, I came here more for the Ubiquiti angle , their networking hardware is genuinely excellent and I’ve been running their gear for years. The protest itself is loud in the way Pussy Riot has always been loud, which is to say deliberately. Whether the acoustics of a corporate lobby are suited to this kind of political statement is another question.
Say what you want about their methods but Pussy Riot doesn’t let the powerful stay comfortable and that deserves credit. People keep asking whether protest music or protest art still works , but the fact that Ubiquiti had any kind of response at all tells you it works well enough to make suits nervous. That’s the whole point. You go where they don’t want you.