Russian Environmental Activists Won 73 Victories in 2023 Against Government and Business

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 20 – The Putin regime and its business allies have won victory after victory against Russian civil society, but there are exceptions. Last year, according to the Ecology Crisis Group, Russian environmental activists across the country won full or partial victories in 73 cases.

            In 40 of these cases, the government or business simply abandoned projects that the environmentalists opposed; and in 33 more, the former have been forced to change their plans or are still fighting with the environmentalists in court (semnasem.org/articles/2024/06/17/kakuyu-rossiyu-my-sohranili-regionalnye-ekopobedy-2023-v-illyustraciyah-nejrosetej).

            This doesn’t mean that the depradation of the Russian environment has stopped or that the Russian government has changed its approach, but it does show that in at least this area, concerned Russian citizens can act and act effectively even against what sometimes seems to be an increasingly all-powerful state.

            And these victories, typically small-scale and far from Moscow as the Horizontal Russia portal suggests in its coverage of the Ecology Crisis Group report, should inspire other Russians to seek to defend their rights and interests rather than continuing to fall into apathy and assuming nothing can be done.