Hello from your own TAW reporter on things Russian from the inside!
First of all, most media reports are WILDLY slanted in favor of one view - that the young women did nothing wrong, just "expressed themselves" and that the government and the Church (often confused as as the same thing) are big, bad institutions that are against freedom. Everything you read is going to slant that way. We immediately get when the Church is attacked, but we might not get other aspects of the thing.
That said, of course the Russian government handled everthing wrongly. The near-universal consensus is that they should immediately have been given several months of community service - I advocated in an Orthodox hospice, orphanage or soup kitchen, myself, to see exactly what one of the two things they were attacking really does.
Now the issue is cannon fodder to make the Church look bad - and I'm afraid there IS bad on our part. The general spokesman - Vsevolod Chaplin - has been extremely disappointing - a spokesman is supposed to make our position clear, and he makes it fuzzy. The general populace NEEDS to understand what exactly forgiveness is, and how effective it is and who benefits if the forgiven party doesn't repent. Yet Chaplin's statements, even in context, do not make any of this clear. He says exactly the things that they can use to make us sound like holier-than-thou neanderthals, and I can't believe he is consistently saying all of that on his own authority - which has rather dismal implications. In plain language, it looks as if the Patriarchate, through those few statements and otherwise by silence on the part of everybody in the upper hierarchy, that the Patriarch/ate is supporting... what the government is doing - in spite of the universal opinion of everyone on the ground.
So we lose. We had a fantastic chance to show the world what the Church teaches and close this case in a slam-dunk, and didn't.
It also leaves me feeling that the hierarchy of the Church here in Russia has really let us down.