Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina: release by Russia a 'PR stunt' Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina is released from jail under the Russian prison amnesty. Sarah Toms reports. PUSSY Riot bandmember Maria Alyokhina, who has been freed from prison under a Kremlin-backed amnesty, has slammed the measure as a mere publicity stunt and says she would have preferred to remain in prison. "I don't think it's an amnesty, it's a profanation," Maria Alyokhina told the Dozhd television channel after her release today, saying it only applied to a tiny minority of convicts. I don't think the amnesty is a humanitarian act, I think it's a PR stunt. "If I had a choice to refuse (the amnesty), I would" have done so, she said. In a sudden bout of magnanimity, Moscow has freed Mikhail Khodorkovsky and is set to release members of Pussy Riot and Greenpeace activists. Is it holiday spirit, or Olympics P.R.? Via The Foreign Bureau, WSJ's global news update. Her lawyer Pyotr Zaikin told RIA Novosti that the 25-year-old Pussy Riot member was apparently headed to the train station in the city in a prison convoy. Reporters waiting for Alyokhina in colony number 2 in Nizhny Novgorod did not get a chance to speak with her after she was whisked away, her other lawyer told AFP. "She is being driven away in a black car, which probably belongs to the head of the colony," said Irina Khrunova. "They didn't hand her over to her lawyer, probably to avoid a media frenzy," she said.' Jailed for anti-Putin protest ... (From left) Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Alyokhina and bandmate Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 24, whose two-year sentences for hooliganism in a Moscow church would have run out in early March, were granted amnesty last week after parliament approved a Kremlin-backed bill. The two women were convicted and jailed on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after staging a "punk prayer" in Moscow's largest cathedral in February 2012, ahead of Vladimir Putin's re-election, to protest the Orthodox Church's support of the strongman during the campaign. Their jailing turned them from almost unknown rebel punks on the fringes of Russian society to the stars of a global cause célèbre symbolising the repression of civil dissent under Putin. The Winter Olympic Games are held in Sochi, Russia, in February 2014.