Pyotr Pavlensky, a 29-year-old artist from St Petersburg, could be charged with hooliganism and face up to five years in prison after a protest in Russia's Red Square. On Sunday, Pavlensky was photographed naked with a nail driven through his genitals into the ground.
The charge of hooliganism is the same one used against 30 Greenpeace activists, including five Britons, whose boat was detained in Russian waters, and against members of the punk band Pussy Riot, who were jailed.
Pavlensky's protest, which lasted nearly two hours on Sunday afternoon, was intended as a metaphor for political apathy in Russia. According to a statement posted on the grani.ru website before the demonstration, Pavlensky wrote:
A naked artist, looking at his balls nailed to the Kremlin pavement, is a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.
Pavlensky has a history of performing painful protests to highlight political causes. In 2011, he sewed his lips together to draw attention to the plight of the jailed Pussy Riot group, and later wrapped his naked body in barbed wire outside a government building in St Petersburg.
The recovered account cited reporting by BBC.
