Window on Eurasia: Moscow’s Attacks on Environmentalists and Environment Intensify

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 3 – The Russian government’s attacks against environmental activists and the environment of Russia itself -- attacks that Yabloko ecologist Aleksey Yablokov calls “a policy of de-ecologization” -- have intensified over the last year, opening the way for even more sweeping violations in the coming one.

 

             The ecologist says that the government has put in place or is seeking to put in place laws that will gut most of the environmental gains of the last two decades. A law adopted in July simply does away with many of the environmental protection provisions of earlier laws.  Moreover, first the legislators themselves and then the government proposed even more drastic steps (echo.msk.ru/blog/yablokov/1467112-echo/).

 

            Among the worst, Yablokov says, was a government proposal calling for the reduction of the number of villages in the special Chernobyl zone from 4413 to 2161 because of the half-lives of cesium and strontrium – even though the half-life of plutonium which contaminates these areas is 24,000 years.

 

            The Russian government also moved across the board against environmental groups. A court in Adygeya liquidated the Ecological Watch on the North Caucasus. Another court sent Yevgeny Vitishko to three years in the camps where he still languishes. It brought charges against other ecologists, and included more than half of the 21 all-Russia ecological groups on the list of “foreign agents.”

 

            Perhaps most ominously, Irina Zelenina, an ecological activist, and her daughter were killed in Moscow oblast in July, a crime for which no one has been held responsible.

 

            Yablokov then offers a calendar of the negative and the positive in Russia’s environmental life in 2014.  In January, Gazprom decided to build a terminal for natural gas on the Sea of Japan despite environmental objections.  In April, the largest forest fire in Russia broke out in the Amur oblast.

            In May, Moscow began building a chain of military bases in the environmentally fragile Arctic. In June, it opened the Bugachan hydro-power station over the objections of environmentalists.  In July, it started the operation of an oil platform in the Pechora Sea. And in August, the killer of a white bear was found, the only one of some 200 cases reported.

 

            Despite these setbacks, Yablokov says, environmental activists did have some successes. In May, the Baikal cellulose plant was closed. In May, another plant that had been dumping chemicals into that lake had its license suspended “(but not annulled!).” In May, Nornikel agreed to greater inspections, and the government stopped construction on the Baltic atomic plant.

 

            Then, in June, Moscow agreed, “after mass protests,” not to use certain kinds of rocket fuel at the Vostochny cosmodrome.  In October, the Russian Supreme Court found for Greenpeace and refused to allow gold mining in one location, and also in that month, the Duma adopted a law allowing environmental inspectors to use video cameras.

 

            The situation isn’t hopeless but it isn’t good, Yablokov concludes, noting that in one online survey at the end of 2014, 75 percent of those taking part said that regional officials are devoting too little attention to the environment, and 51 percent believe that “the ecological situation in their region over the last years has gotten worse.”