Anastasia Kunyashova and Yulia Izhilenko worked at a Pyaterochka store in Sochi. Izhilenko said on October 1 that both were fired after the video was published, and that the clip was the reason. The outlet 7x7 reported on her video.
The video was posted on September 21, the day after voting ended. In it, the employees show new price tags in the store and say some products had risen in price by 20 to 30 rubles.
The clip spread across social media and drew 5.4 million views.
Izhilenko was dismissed under Part 1 of Article 77 of the Labor Code, by agreement of the parties.
"The company got so scared that a girl blogger could ruin the company's reputation. As if I changed those price tags. <...> Do you understand the absurdity of the situation? To fire two girls from work because of the phrase 'The elections ended - prices went up,'" 7x7 quoted her as saying.
She also said that kvass, which had risen in price by about 50 rubles in the first video, was being sold again at its previous price of about 150 rubles the very next day after publication. Izhilenko urged her subscribers to write to Pyaterochka's social media accounts and demand that she and Kunyashova be reinstated. She said representatives of the retail chain had not contacted her since the dismissal.
Hundreds of comments about the dismissals appeared under Pyaterochka's latest post, with the most popular ones devoted to the story. A video calling for the women to be reinstated has already gathered more than 7 million views, TV Rain reported.
On October 1, the second stage of this year's increase in utility fees began in Russia. In January, fees were indexed by 1.7 percent, and now the size of the increase varies by region. The Krasnodar region was among six regions for which the government additionally raised the permitted increase a few days before the new indexation.
The order of September 24 was signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, four days after the elections ended. For the Krasnodar region, the previously set index was raised from 9.6 to 13.7 percent. In Kuzbass it was increased from 12 to 19.8 percent, in Mari El from 9.4 to 14.9 percent, in Yakutia from 15 to 18.9 percent, in Buryatia from 8.9 to 12.3 percent, and in the Volgograd region from 9.4 to 11.2 percent.
The index does not mean that every bill will automatically rise by that amount: it determines the permissible change in the total utility fee on average across the region, while the specific sum depends on the municipality, the set of services and the established tariffs.
Sources differ: 7x7 writes about the dismissal of Pyaterochka employees in the Krasnodar region, while TV Rain specifies that the store is in Sochi. Both outlets and The Insider cite the same figure for the video's views, 5.4 million, while TV Rain reports 5.7 million views and more than 7 million for the video calling for the women to be reinstated.