Updated at 11:29 a.m. ET: MOSCOW --  A judge sentenced three women who staged an anti-Kremlin protest on the altar of Moscow's main Russian Orthodox church to two years in jail each on Friday in a trial seen as test of President Vladimir Putin's tolerance of dissent.

The trio from punk band Pussy Riot, handcuffed in a courtroom cage, reacted with giggles and one rolled her eyes when the judge issued the sentences after reading the guilty verdict for almost three hours.

A man in the courtroom shouted "Shame!" and hundreds of protesters outside the Moscow courthouse repeated that chant and whistled when news of the sentence came.

"They are in jail because it is Putin's personal revenge," opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in the courtroom. "This verdict was written by Vladimir Putin."

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred for performing a "punk prayer" in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. They called on the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin.

Their feminist punk collective has about 10 members who appear in public in ski masks for anonymous impromptu performances they describe as a form of protest art.

The defendants said they were protesting against close ties between Putin and the Russian Orthodox church and did not intend to offend believers, but the judge rejected those arguments.

The U.S. Embassy in Russia criticized the sentences.

"Today's sentence in the Pussy Riot case looks disproportionate to the actions," the U.S. Embassy in Russia wrote in Russian on Friday on its Twitter microblog.

Pussy Riot supporters protest at Russian cathedral as global campaign heats up

Prosecutors had requested three-year sentences. The two-year sentences include the nearly six months served since the defendants were jailed following the Feb. 21 protest.

Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP - Getty Images

Members of the punk band Pussy Riot -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, center, Maria Alyokhina, right, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, left -- are escorted Friday by policewomen inside a Moscow court building.

In a sign of the tension over the trial in a small Moscow courtroom, Judge Marina Syrova was assigned bodyguards on Thursday following what authorities said were threats.

Divisions
The trial divided Russia's Orthodox Christians, with many backing the authorities' demands for severe punishment, but others saying the women should be granted clemency.

The trial featured a parade of state witnesses who say they were traumatized by the church performance, which prosecutors called an abuse of God.

Russia's Pussy Riot: Unmasked and on trial

Ahead of the verdict, their lawyers said the outcome will be dictated by the Kremlin. Putin's supporters denied that and portrayed the women as blasphemers and self-publicists who should be punished for committing a premeditated outrage against the Church.

Members of Pussy Riot were found guilty Friday after staging this protest on Feb. 21, 2012, inside Christ The Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

"It was a conscious deed. They understood quite clearly where they were going and why," said Vladimir Burmatov, who represents Putin's United Russia party in parliament.

Pussy Riot was formed last year in anger at Putin's decision to return to the presidency in an election after four years as premier. The band's public performances were popular on the Internet, but it is the trial that has brought them global fame.

The charges against them raised concern abroad about freedom of speech in Russia two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Small, but raucous protests were held Friday in a few dozen cities in support of the three women. A few dozen people came out in Barcelona, Spain, a couple hundred in Paris, and a handful in Washington. Other rallies were held in Bulgaria, Ukraine and elsewhere.

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The opposition says Putin saw the trial initially as a chance to strengthen his relationship with the influential Russian Orthodox Church -- about 70 percent of Russians say they follow the faith -- but his plans backfired.

Although believers were united in outrage that the band thrashed out a "punk prayer" deriding Putin in a place they consider sacrosanct, many were upset by the Church hierarchy's lack of forgiveness and calls for "divine retribution."

From March 2012: Anti-Putin activists pay high price, but refuse to back down

Many Russians, including some of the Orthodox faithful, are concerned about ties between church and state under Patriarch Kirill, who has praised Putin's rule as a "miracle of God."

Aware that a long sentence could reinforce the picture Pussy Riot has painted of him as intolerant and repressive, Putin told reporters this month that although the women had done "nothing good," they should not be judged too harshly.

But the damage to Putin's image abroad has already been done, and divisions between his supporters and opponents have widened, risking polarizing society even more than when protests took off against his 12-year-rule during the winter.

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In moves seen by the opposition as a crackdown, parliament has recently rushed through laws increasing fines for protesters, tightening controls on the Internet -- which is used to arrange protests -- and imposing stricter rules on defamation.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a member of female punk band Pussy Riot, is escorted by police as she arrives at a Moscow court on Monday.

Updated at 9:20 a.m. ET: MOSCOW - Three women who protested against Vladimir Putin in a "punk prayer" on the altar of Russia's main cathedral went on trial Monday in a case seen as a test of the longtime leader's treatment of dissent during a new presidential term.

The members of the band Pussy Riot face up to seven years in prison for an unsanctioned performance in February in which they entered Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral, ascended the altar and called on the Virgin Mary to "throw Putin out!"

Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, were brought to Moscow's Khamovniki court for Russia's highest-profile trial since former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2010.

Governments and rights groups, as well as musicians such as Sting, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Franz Ferdinand, have expressed concern about the trial, reflecting doubts that Putin - who is serving his third presidential term and could be in power until 2024 - will become more tolerant of dissenting voices.

On Monday, supporters chanted "Girls, we're with you!" and "Victory!" as the women, each handcuffed by the wrist to a female officer, were led from a white and blue police van into the courthouse through a side entrance. Streets around the court, on a high Moscow River embankment, were closed.

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They were led into a metal and clear-plastic courtroom cage, where they milled and spoke with lawyers as preparations began. Tolokonnikova, in a blue checkered shirt, lowered her head to speak through a small opening in the enclosure. Two pairs of handcuffs hung at the ready just beside her face.

"We did not want to offend anybody," Tolokonnikova said, speaking to a defense lawyer who stood outside the enclosure. "We admit our political guilt, but not legal guilt."

The band's stunt was designed to highlight the close relationship between the dominant Russian Orthodox Church and former KGB officer Putin, then prime minister, whose campaign to return to the presidency in a March election was backed clearly, if informally, by the leader of the church, Patriarch Kirill.

'Serious problems' with vote that kept Putin in power, monitors say

Symbolically, the trial is taking place in the same Moscow courthouse where Khodorkovsky was found guilty of stealing his own oil in a trial in 2010 that many Western politicians said looked like a crude Kremlin attempt to keep a man it saw as a political threat behind bars.

'Our motives are exclusively political'
The women are charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility.

But in opening statements read by a defense lawyer, who sometimes struggled with the handwritten texts, they said they were protesting against Kirill's political support for Putin and had no animosity toward the church or the faithful.

"I have never had such feelings toward anyone in the world," Tolokonnikova said in her statement. "We are not enemies of Christians ... our motives are exclusively political."

"We only want Russia to change for the better," she said.

Alyokhina's statement said: "I thought the church loved all its children, but it seems the church loves only those children who love Putin."

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Maria Alyokhina, a member of Pussy Riot, arrives at a Moscow court on Monday.

The women looked thinner and paler than they did when they were jailed following the performance in late February, shortly before Putin, in power as president from 2000-2008 and then as prime minister, won a six-year presidential term on March 4.

"She looks like she has been on a long hunger strike," Stanislav Samutsevich said of his daughter. "Her cheeks are hollow … I've never seen her in such a state. I think this is like an inquisition, like mockery."

A reporter on state-run Rossiya-24 television presented a different picture, focusing on occasional smiles and chuckles and an overall air of self-assuredness among the women, who whispered to each other as a prosecutor read the charges.

PhotoBlog: Topless feminist confronts Russian church patriarch

"Look at their faces; they are laughing and joking," the reporter said on the news, adding that a viewer might think they were "continuing the action" they carried out at the cathedral.

Prosecutors asked for the trial, which was streamed live on the Internet, to be closed to the public and the media, saying a "rift in society" and emotions over the case put the defendants and other participants at risk.

Envelope-pushing performances
Pussy Riot, who say they were inspired by bands such as Bikini Kill from the 1990s-era Riot Grrrl U.S. feminist punk movement, burst onto the scene this winter with angry lyrics and envelope-pushing performances, including one on Red Square, that went viral on the Internet.

The collective see themselves as part of a disenchanted generation that is looking for creative ways to show its dissatisfaction with Putin's dominance of the political landscape.

The all-girl group has no lead singer, and, in order that anyone may join, its members don multi-colored balaclavas, which have become its trademark. They numbered five when they formed in November but later expanded to 10 members, though there have been no performances in Russia since their bandmates' arrest.

Among the group's most noted outrageous acts was the drawing of an enormous phallus on a drawbridge in St. Petersburg. Several members participated in an obscene "fertility rite" at Moscow museum, mocking Dmitry Medvedev, who was elected Russian president the next day.

From March 2012: Anti-Putin activists pay high price, but refuse to back down

'Russian superhero' needed?
One member of the group, who spoke to Britain's The Observer newspaper, said members of the band masked their faces to appear anonymous in public to show that "everybody can be Pussy Riot." The 25-year-old, who spoke via video while in hiding for fear of arrest, went by the nickname "Sparrow."

She said a "Russian superhero" was needed at the moment. Wearing masks and costumes during performances, "Sparrow" told The Observer, felt like "having a second life. It's like being Spider-Man or Catwoman. ... When I'm in a mask I feel a little bit like a superhero. I feel more power. I feel really brave. I believe that I can do everything and can change the situation."

Russian Orthodox Church apologizes for Photoshopping patriarch's watch

She also told the newspaper: "It's a bit scary but we're sure what we are doing is right. … When you're doing the right thing you're not scared. Because it's horrible what's happened to the girls."

Anthony Kiedis and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers spoke out in support of the group during the Calif. funk-rock band's July 22 concert in Moscow. Kiedis wore a Pussy Riot t-shirt on stage and both musicians gave letters to Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova's husband, according to The Guardian newspaper.

Church revival
The unsanctioned performance that prompted the arrest of three Pussy Riot members offended many believers in predominantly Orthodox Christian Russia, where the church has enjoyed a huge revival since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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But while some two-thirds of the country's 142 million people are considered Russian Orthodox, the number of practicing churchgoers is far smaller in a nation where the legacy of decades of official atheism looms large.

Patriarch Kirill has said the church was "under attack by persecutors" and has encouraged pro-church demonstrations including a procession to Christ the Savior in April.

"This is only the small, visible tip of an iceberg of extremists," Mikhail Kuznetsov, a lawyer representing church security guards, said in an interview with the newspaper Moscow News last week. "They are aiming to destroy the thousand-year-old traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, to provoke a schism, and to deceivingly bring the flock not towards God, but towards Satan."

'Harmless civil activity'
The defendants' supporters say the charges are politically-motivated.

In a poll by the independent Levada Center and released by the prominent newspaper Kommersant earlier this month, 50 percent of Muscovites said they did not support a criminal trial for the members of Pussy Riot, with 36 percent supporting the trial.

Pussy Riot's cathedral performance was part of a lively protest movement that at its peak saw 100,000 people turn out for rallies in Moscow, some of the largest in Russia since the demise of the USSR.

Reuters, The Associated Press and NBC News staff contributed to this report.

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