As soon as I left the court which condemned him to a fine for “disobedience to the police”, Irina Kourisseva returns to inspect the new destruction in a national park near Moscow, where the authorities want to build a highway.
In Russia, against the backdrop of offensive in Ukraine and repression of any dissident voice, the fight for environmental protection has become a risky affair.
“The authorities have become totally indifferent” to this question and the legislation was “softened” in favor of “polluting” companies and real estate developers, notes an environmental activist, under the cover of anonymity.
In the suburbs of Moscow, the construction of buildings does not be flexible, and thousands of inhabitants who work in the capital spend hours in the traffic jams.
To improve traffic in Koroliov, a city of 200,000 inhabitants in the northeast of Moscow, the authorities have decided to build a new motorway that will pass … In the middle of the Lossinyi Ostrov National Park, which revolts Irina Kourisseva, 62.
So, at the end of July, with five other comrades, she put herself on the way to a machine that unloaded asphalt in the forest. They were arrested by the police and sentenced to fines, after spending one night at the post.
“We were asked as if we were criminals and had killed someone,” said this resident of Koroliov.
With its 129 km2 of forests, Lossinyi Ostrov – “The island of impulses” in Russian – is a refuge for some 280 species of animals, including deer, impulses, wild boars and foxes, and more than 160 species of birds, some of which are disappearing.
Russian law prohibits any construction in national parks. But the authorities have found the parade: they present the project as the “compensation” for an already existing road.
“It is a falsification and a scam. There has never been a road there,” protested Dmitri Trouunine, a lawyer defender of the environment for over 25 years.
In fact, it is a dirt road used by the forest guards, which then becomes a path between the trees.
– “The judge smiled” –
Irina Kourisseva explains that “asphalt powder” was discharged on this path “to show then that there was already a road”.
The highway must be built by March 2026, according to the Regional Ministry of Transport, for an amount of 497 million rubles (5.4 million euros), and will serve access to a new real estate complex in Koroliov.
In court, “the judge smiled”, remembers Mikhail Rogov, an engineer 36 years old. “She said to us: +if you don’t want any problems, sign these papers, pay the fines and you are free +,” he said.
This judge, Maria Loktionova, had condemned another environmental activist, Alexandre Bakhtine, to six years in prison for three publications on social networks, in 2023 denouncing the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
“We only want to defend nature. There are not only us who need it,” said Irina.
Kirill Iankov, member of an expert council of the Russian Ministry of Transport, says that he proposed a “alternative” road project bypassing the park, which was rejected.
– “Do not mix the president” –
In June, a thousand people line up in front of the presidential administration in Moscow to file complaints against the project, sent to Vladimir Putin.
The Russian president had visited Lossinyi Ostrov in 2010; Nourishing a baby momentum in the bottle, he then said that nature was “a gift from God” that it was necessary to “protect”.
Change of speech in 2025: “This is a question for the regional authorities. Do not mix the president,” insisted in July the spokesperson for the Kremlin Dmitri Peskov, interviewed about this road. The protection of nature “should not be an obstacle to the development and comfort of the life of city dwellers,” he added.
“It is increasingly difficult to defend the truth in the courts. The vertical + + of power achieves its decisions and the police and the control bodies obey it,” laments Dmitri Trouunin.
In Russia, the quality of the environment has deteriorated in recent years, and in an accelerated manner since the offensive in Ukraine launched in February 2022, environmentalists at AFP explained.
A oil spill hit the Black Sea in December, caused by two Russian oil tankers. Ecologists and scientists accused the Russian authorities of having reacted too late and of having caused an ecological disaster.
Posted on August 14 at 10:10 a.m., AFP
