Russia announces that it has started the procedure to designate Alla Pugaciova, the legend of Soviet music, as a “foreign agent”

The head of the Federal Security and Anticorruption Project, Vitali Borodin, announced that he received a response from the General Prosecutor’s Office to his request to recognize Alla Pugaciova as a foreign agent. The prosecutor’s office will ask the Ministry of Justice to launch the appropriate procedure, writes Kommersant.

“I received a response from the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation to my request. The procedure to recognize Alla Pugaciova as a foreign agent has been started. The prosecution will ask the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation to recognize Pugaciova as a foreign agent. I hope the regulatory authorities will put an end to this matter,” Borodin wrote on Telegram.

Alla Pugaciova and her husband Maxim Galkin (already declared a foreign agent) left for Israel in the spring of 2022.

The singer has repeatedly spoken out publicly against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Among other things, Alla Pugaciova called for an end to “the deaths of our boys for illusory purposes that make our country a pariah and burden the lives of its citizens.”

She later delivered a harsh new message against the war, saying that people who criticize her because of her stance on it are “slaves”.

“Dear good! What a blessing to be hated by those people I always couldn’t stand. If they liked me, it would mean that I sang and lived for nothing. The reason is clear. Let them gnash their teeth,” she wrote in a post on her Instagram account.

“THEY WERE SERVES, THEY BECAME SLAVES,” she emphasized in all caps at the end of the message. It is not clear if her message was directed at anyone in particular, as she has been attacked by several Russian officials and artists after denouncing the war in Ukraine.

In September 2022, the Ministry of Justice added Maxim Galkin to the register of foreign agents.

After this, Pugaciova also asked to be included in this register, because “she is in solidarity with her husband”.

In December 2023, however, it was learned that the authorities had not initiated criminal proceedings against the singer and her husband under the article on defamation of the Russian military.

In February, politician Dmitri Gusev asked the Ministry of Internal Affairs to check whether the artist’s house could be confiscated under the new law on the property of foreign agents.