A Moscow court has freed one of the convicted women from the punk band Pussy Riot but upheld two-year jail terms for the other two.
There were cheers in court when the two-year jail term of Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, was suspended.
Earlier the trio spoke defiantly at the appeal hearing, saying their protest song was political and not anti-Church.
In August they were jailed for staging an anti-Kremlin protest in Moscow's main cathedral, Christ the Saviour.
Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, were found guilty of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
Their imprisonment sparked widespread international condemnation.
The judges on Wednesday accepted the argument of Samutsevich's lawyer — that Samutsevich had been thrown out of the cathedral by guards before she could remove her guitar from its case for the band's “punk prayer.”
The other band members cheered and hugged Samutsevich when the decision was read out.
Earlier Alyokhina told the hearing: “We're all innocent... the verdict should be overturned. The Russian justice system looks discredited.”
Alyokhina said that “of course we didn't want to offend worshippers” when they protested at the cathedral's altar.
She said the trio's apologies had been ignored, but repentance was out of the question.
“For us to repent — that's unacceptable, it's a kind of blackmail,” she said, adding that repentance was a personal matter, unconnected with a legal case.
She added she had “lost hope in this trial.”
The three women sat in a glass cage in court, facing a three-judge panel.
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