Environmentalists are increasingly the targets of attacks and intimidation, even when they just want to help authorities to prevent wildfires. Here is another side effect of the anti-Western rhetoric that is polluting Russia.
They were beaten and injured in the middle of the night, threatened at gunpoint, their equipment was stolen or destroyed. The group of 19 activists of Greenpeace Russia was camping somewhere near Krasnodar to take preventive action against wildfires. Because the authorities prefer to let the woods burn.
Their camp was attacked by masked gunmen. They used batons and stun grenades, threatened to kill them and make them disappear. “When they threw me on the ground and pointed a gun at me, I felt a sort of relief, waiting for them to shoot. They fired the shot into the ground instead — right near my head“, the group’s leader Grigory Kuksin wrote on Facebook.
Not an isolated episode
The Krasnodar incident it is perhaps the most serious, but the Russian environmentalists are getting used to countless small threats and intimidations. Last month, another group of ecologists who was documenting the environmental risks caused by the activity of an oil operation in the Taymyr Peninsula in the far north of Siberia, were followed and filmed. A television station later aired the video, manipulated to make it appear that they were desecrating local graveyards.
Another group of volunteers who went to the Yamal Peninsula to monitor climate change that caused a dispersion of anthrax from the permafrost, found themselves faced with many unexpected obstacles. “Since we arrived, the police followed us and even visited us at our hotel to perform a surprise document check. Then they arrested the veterinarian who first documented the anthrax epidemic, right at the gates to our hotel, and two reindeer herders who wanted to talk to us”, the head of the expedition, Vladimir Chuprov, said.
It’s unfortunately too easy to link such episodes to the treatment reserved to the international group that tried to board the Prirazlomnaja oil rig, in the Pechora Sea, in 2013.
Sterilizing the society
According to the spokesman for Greenpeace Russia, Khalimat Tekeyeva, the recent incidents aren’t connected. “We are talking about three different regions very far from one another. But for some reason, the local authorities in all three of these places were apparently afraid that we would see something we aren’t supposed to see, and so they decided to deal with it in their own, sometimes illegal, ways”, she said the Moscow Times.
However, it is hard to deny that the increasingly open hostility towards Greenpeace is an effect of the anti-Western rhetoric that pervades the Putin doctrine and the crackdown on civic activism in all its forms. “Go back to your America,” shouted the attackers while beating the group of Kuksin, according to his account, although there was not even one foreigner among them.
And on September 14, the Ministry of Justice declared a local environmental organization in contact with Greenpeace to be a “foreign agent“, according to the controversial law on NGOs signed by Putin.
Sergei Simak, head of Russia’s Green League NGO, is convinced that local authorities are trying to “stifle activists wherever possible, in order to ‘sterilize’ Russian society and eliminate any independent public activity“.
The only acceptable variables remain consent or apathy.
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Environmentalists are increasingly the targets of attacks and intimidation, even when they just want to help authorities to prevent wildfires. Here is another side effect of the anti-Western rhetoric that is polluting Russia.
