Scorched earth protest: Russia’s environmental activists are plowing on despite repression

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Romashkovo, a fairy-tale forest that is no more

In the fall of 2024, environmental activist Ivan Shchekin came to Malevich Park in the Romashkovo Forest near the city of Odintsovo, Moscow Region. Known for its picturesque landscape, the forest had once played a bit part in a Soviet-era cartoon featuring a steam train that always arrived late when running through Romashkovo because it couldn’t resist the urge to slow down and enjoy the scenery.

But that hasn’t saved the forest from Russia’s nominally Soviet-nostalgic authorities. When he showed up last fall, Shchekin, in his capacity as an inspector of the National Committee for Environmental Safety NGO, asked the workers busily cutting down the trees to show their permits. When they failed to do so, he called the police and demanded that the workers stop. In response, one of the workers grabbed a shovel and started beating the activist with it, forcing Shchekin to use pepper spray in self-defense.

Eventually, the workers ran away — after breaking the shovel shaft against Ivan's head. An ambulance took Shchekin to an emergency room, where he was diagnosed with an open head wound and a fractured left arm. The ring finger on his right hand was nearly severed by a shovel blow, but medics managed to sew it back on. This represented just another day at the office — a few days earlier, a worker had swung a chainsaw at Shchekin.

Why are activists outraged about Malevich Park? The park was set up on a 360-hectare area of the Serebryanoborsky Experimental Forestry, which supposedly enjoys a special protection status. However, the park features miles of bicycle paths, cafes with parking lots, art installations, and land-art exhibition spaces, the construction of which required cutting down hundreds of trees, destroying pristine natural landscapes, and threatening populations of endangered birds, prompting protests from conservationists and locals.

Kazimir Malevich, the famous Ukrainian-Russian avant-garde artist, lived five kilometers away from here, in Nemchinovka. According to a legend invented by the park's creators, he came to the site to draw under an oak tree (in reality, Malevich's favorite oak tree, under which his will requested that he be buried, grew in a completely different location).

Moscow Government's scheming around green zones

In late November 2024, Moscow adopted the law “On the Protection and Use of the Green Fund.” The city government advertised it as an initiative to unite all of Moscow's green spaces — from major urban parks to shriveling patches of grass in neighborhood squares — into a single “green framework.” According to the officials, green spaces will be managed consistently, and the adoption of the framework is supposed to create “new hiking and walking routes and eco-trails.”

Moscow's Department of Nature Management insists that the adoption of the law did not decrease the number of protected natural areas in the city, and even increased it fivefold. As promised by Stepan Orlov, Chair of the Commission on Urban Economy and Housing Policy of Moscow's city parliament, “the protection regime will be strengthened for the territories included in the green framework. The law facilitates the enforcement of control where there was none: you can protect your favorite neighborhood public garden on a citywide level.” In parallel with this law, the Moscow City Duma amended the Administrative Code of Moscow, increasing fines for destroying and damaging green spaces in protected areas to 5,000 rubles ($60) for individuals and 1 million rubles ($11,500) for businesses.

However, on the last working day of 2024, the city authorities issued Decree N 3160-PP, effectively obliterating the city's network of “specially protected natural areas” (OOPT), changing their status to “specially protected green areas” (OOZT). Until recently, Moscow had as many as 148 protected natural areas. Now only two remain: Losiny Ostrov and a linden grove within its boundaries, which has been designated as a separate protected area.

How is the new status different? While the Ministry of Natural Resources does not allow moving the boundaries of specially protected natural areas, changes to protected green spaces are permissible, opening up development opportunities. As a follow-up, the mayor's office soon authorized the construction of power lines, pipelines, designated paths, and sports and recreation facilities in the green zones — along with parking lots and access roads.

The effects of the directive soon became visible. For example, the Mnevnikovskaya Floodplain in the north-west of Moscow — which Mayor Sobyanin's office encroached upon back in 2018 despite the protests of activists and locals — has already been marked on the Rosreestr public cadastral map as an area for future development.

The floodplain area is divided into areas intended for capital construction, including high-rise residential and commercial development. Notably, the first lot was mapped on Dec. 28, 2024 — the day after the green area decree was passed.

By 2030, the Moscow authorities promise to create on the territory of Mnevnikovskaya Floodplain “a sports cluster on par with the Luzhniki Arena,” residential areas, and “social infrastructure facilities,” including three educational centers for 1,650 students and a kindergarten for 200 children.

“The industrial and construction lobby has managed to ensure complete freedom of action for Moscow's developers. They can build shopping centers or housing compounds in the city's green areas, pave roads, and do commercial landscaping. I would call this law a victory of the construction industry over society,” says environmental activist Dmitry Morozov.

According to experts, the vast territories of Moskvoretsky and Bittsevsky parks are facing the biggest threat. Before the new decree, developers could pluck only individual pieces from parks, and there were legal mechanisms to challenge their desire to do so, but now all restrictions have been lifted. Vitaly Servetnik, coordinator of the Environmental Crisis Group, is sure that the timing of the move to ease protections on protected areas was not accidental. In the third year of the full-scale war, with Russian businesses deprived of the opportunity to invest in European projects, domestic commercial interests needed to open up new opportunities to earn money at home.

Environmentalists also warn about the harm of Sobyanin's “urban improvement,” which involves the use of heavy machinery, tiles, and lampposts for pedestrian paths in the capital's parks, causing irreparable damage to established ecosystems. Moscow environmentalists have repeatedly called on the authorities to stop “improving” the capital's parks. But as if to spite the activists, in the summer of 2023 Vladimir Putin transferred authority over Moscow's largest forest, the Losiny Ostrov National Park, from the Ministry of Natural Resources to the Moscow Mayor's Office. By late 2024, Sobyanin had already proposed dividing the park into several clusters, one of which would remain a protected area, while the rest would accommodate a variety of recreational facilities.

“Much of Russia's current environmental legislation was adopted shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Servetnik explains. “Professional ecologists contributed to its drafting, and although the environmental community found certain aspects controversial, the legislation was generally adequate. However, when Putin began his rise to power in 2000, he abolished the State Committee on Ecology in one of his first decrees, and we saw this legislation gradually weakened. Each new crisis in the country — be it 2014, COVID-19, or the full-scale invasion — produced a new wave of weaker environmental laws. Unfortunately, I have reason to believe that even the liquidation of Moscow's protected areas is not yet the culmination.”

Uncontrolled logging

Dmitry Morozov recalls how he and his colleagues spent years barraging consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, environmental protection agency Rosprirodnadzor, various prefectures, and a handful of other relevant organizations with requests to establish the actual amount of felling and reforestation done by the capital's authorities. Finally, in May 2022, former Moscow City Duma deputies Elena Yanchuk and Evgeny Stupin received a response from the Department of Nature Management indicating that Moscow had been cutting down tens of thousands more trees than it planted since 2020.

According to the data, in 2020, 45,511 trees were cut down in Moscow's east and south alone, but only 19,152 were planted. In 2021, a total of 41,447 trees were cut down and 14,645 planted. In the first five months of 2022, 2,778 trees were cut down against 1,321 planted. The authorities “compensate” for the tens of thousands of trees destroyed by planting hundreds of thousands of shrubs, which environmentalists do not view as an adequate replacement.

The capital's government likes to boast that Moscow is allegedly the greenest metropolis in the world. According to Alexei Shaposhnikov, Chairperson of the Moscow City Duma, more than half of Moscow's territory is “occupied by historical forests, parks, public gardens, and boulevards,” and more than one-third of the city's land consists of “preserved natural areas.” But as Morozov explains, the officials doctored this ratio on paper by “sewing” New Moscow with its fields and forests to the city itself, thereby increasing the number of green areas. For instance, the Troitsky Forest, located beyond the Moscow Ring Road, somehow began to “improve” the health of Muscovites living in the city center simply because the maps were redrawn.

The environmental NGO Earth Touches Everyone estimates the total area of Moscow's forests to be 81,000 hectares. Roughly 10,000 hectares are natural and historical parks — the part of Losiny Ostrov located inside the city accounts for another 3,000, the Zelenogradsky Urban Forest occupies 1,000 hectares, and the remaining 61,000 hectares are the forests of New Moscow.

Since the adoption of the 2006 Forest Code, experts complain that “systemic forestry and urban park management has been almost non-existent” in Moscow. No work is carried out in the forests of New Moscow other than periodic sanitary cuttings and subsequent reforestation. Meanwhile, trees also die due to fires, pollution, and bark beetle infestation, among other causes. Experts warn that “with this approach, the condition of most of Moscow's forests will inevitably deteriorate.”

Of beavers and men

On Feb. 16, Moscow historian Andrei Dvornikov posted on his Telegram channel photos of a mass of young fish and three frozen beavers found in the ice of the Moskva River near the Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve. Graphic images of animals frozen with their paws up made a stir on social media, but Dvornikov was more concerned about the thousands of dead fry. Last summer, the activist wrote that Kolomenskoye was struggling with a fish epidemic and that dead seagulls were often found on the premises of the museum-reserve.

The mass death of beavers and fish took place right in front of the felling site in Kuryanovo, where two years earlier the authorities had cut down 100 hectares of forest in record time. Within a week, the lush forest was replaced by a landfill, with puddles of chemicals appearing on nearby roads and fresh corpses of birds found in the vicinity every day.

Officials reassured locals that the felling was necessary for the construction of an air defense site, but according to the plan — at The Insider's disposal — the military object only required five hectares. As for the rest, the mayor's office offered the area up to affiliated state-owned enterprises for “production sites.”

A 2022 study by a group of scientists from the Faculty of Geology of Moscow State University showed that the content of carcinogenic benzo[a]pyrene in Moscow road dust is 53 times higher than in soils near Moscow. Interestingly enough, the highest pollution levels were recorded not on busy highways, but in residential areas where Muscovites park their cars: the housing construction is so dense that it causes poor air circulation in the city.

The most polluted areas of the capital are the south, southeast, east, and city center, where poor air circulation, large industrial facilities, and traffic jams have driven the concentration of benzo[a]pyrene to 50 times the threshold value — making the development of cancer two to three times as likely as in other parts of the city. Instead of solving the problem by creating green spaces, the authorities are cutting down trees.

Environmentalists have identified the following green areas as those most at risk:

• Bitsa Park, a large urban forest, the place of eternal struggle between locals and developers
• The forest near the Salaryevo housing estate, which the authorities plan to cut down to build a 0.41-hectare church compound
• The Pokrovskoye-Streshnevo Park in the north-west of Moscow ravaged by “improvement”
• The Losiny Ostrov National Park with developers squeezing it from all directions
• The Setun River Valley Nature Reserve in Ramenki, where residents struggle with toxic water pollution and fight off plans to build automobile bridges or a high-rise residential area
• Europe's largest Botanical Garden, which Sobyanin's officials are renovating
• The long-suffering Troitsky Forest: after suppressing protests over the construction of a school for 2,100 students on 5 hectares of what used to be green spaces, the authorities have started felling more trees to build a road and an outpatient clinic
• The White Birch Cemetery: a project to create Europe's largest cemetery in the Troitsky District, the cemetery has already been approved by the city government, but locals are unhappy with the prospective destruction of 500 hectares of forest and the excavation of contaminated land around the former Malinki landfill.
  

“If you look at satellite images (or at least drone images) of the Bitsa Park over the last ten years, you will see that the forest is losing its foliage, turning from green to gray. Another problem is the number of landfills, which is constantly growing. This means that the forest's biodiversity will continue to suffer and that birds and squirrels will continue to disappear,” Morozov warns.

What environmentalists are trying to do

On a Sunday afternoon, environmental activists are collecting signatures at the entrance to Bitsa Park in an effort to demonstrate that local citizens, too, are against capital development in the urban forest and the destruction of Moscow's protected natural areas. They plan to send petitions to the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Presidential Administration. As the activists explain, federal legislation has no mechanisms allowing for the withdrawal of land from protected areas, meaning Sobyanin's city administration has performed a legal trick. Now it is up to the federal authorities to challenge the legitimacy of the move.

Conservationists are confident that sufficient publicity will be enough to turn the tide. As a precedent, they cite the protests against the construction of a highway through Losiny Ostrov, an action in which locals collected more than 30,000 signatures, derailing the developers' plans. (Nevertheless, there is now talk of new plans to build an entrance to the city of Korolev through the national park.) The champions of protected areas are hopeful the mayor's office will back down if faced with strong opposition from society. But not everyone agrees.

“They want to build, so let them build,” a man walking his dog shrugs, refusing to sign. A woman in a red jacket next to him is hesitant: “Will it make a difference?” The activists assure her that publicity is key, and the woman agrees to leave her contact information and signature on the form.

Overall, about half of the passers-by agree to sign. Many people have already heard about the revised status of protected natural areas and come specifically to leave a signature.

Boris, who is collecting signatures in the opposite part of the Bitsa Park, where a massive unauthorized landfill was recently discovered, complains that many locals refuse to believe what the activists are telling them about the authorities. Elena, a defender of Bitsa Park, agrees with him: many people dismiss the activists' claims against the city administration as wild, groundless allegations.

“They've been 'improving' our forest since 2022,” Elena says. “For some reason, they had to build those huge, arch-shaped entrance gates. People already know where the entrance is, but builders, who had no permits, damaged trees, broke branches, destroyed everything in their path, and even drove over the rare mushrooms called scarlet elf cup — Sarcoscypha austriaca.”

The builders' actions have provoked many clashes with conservationists and locals. At the end of February, activists fended off Mosgaz employees wandering around with chainsaws and Stroystandart workers who were about to install arches with “Welcome” signs. Neither of them had permits to carry out the work, so the police sided with the environmentalists.

Across Moscow, activists are trying to protect their parks from developers and “improvement.” They have united in a citywide movement called SaveOOPT, which is trying to oppose Mayor Sobyanin's reform.

In addition to Bitsa Park, activists are collecting signatures in Novokosino, Teply Stan, Krylatskoe, the Setun River Valley, and other districts where parks may be destroyed if developers’ efforts are not resisted. All applications for rallies were predictably rejected due to coronavirus restrictions — still in place in Moscow, at least when appealing to public health is of utility to the authorities. “We have to choose between doing nothing and doing what we can. Even if we fail to reinstate the protected area status, the collection of signatures will unite us and remind people that they are not alone in this nightmare,” the activists say.

Environmental protectionists from Earth Touches Everyone propose to demand that the Prosecutor General's Office challenge the decree on the liquidation of protected areas as running contrary to federal legislation. Earlier attempts to accomplish this in court failed.

“If 'improvement' continues at the current pace, Moscow as a city where you can live comfortably without worrying about your or your children getting a pollution-related condition has some twenty years left,” Morozov explains. “The city center has even less — maybe ten years. By then, the ecosphere will be irreparably damaged, with nothing but mowed lawns and public gardens where all insects are dead, no birds nest, and no animals live. This is not nature but an imitation, and this imitation is gradually covering all of Moscow.”

How the authorities fight environmentalists

“Before 2022, Russia's environmental movement had many opportunities,” says Morozov. “People blocked roads, organized small protests, elected their deputies to local parliaments, blocked development. The Troitsky Forest case was when it all ended.”

In early 2022, activists’ efforts to preserve the Troitsky Forest saw massive grassroots demonstrations that ultimately led to violent clashes between “people's vigilantes” and provocateurs hired by the developer. This was an environmental protest format that had become customary since the Khimki campaign of 2010, which saw activists delay the construction of a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Then repression of the Troitsky Forest felt harsh at the time, but it would feel mild by today's standards: people were detained for “unsanctioned protests.” After spending the night in a police station, around 200 were issued fines. On Feb. 14, 2022, the Troitsky court sentenced five forest defenders to up to nine days in jail. But ten days later, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, it became clear that the era of mass environmental protests was over, Morozov recalls.

An environmental movement is effective when it includes both a professional expert community and grassroots activists, explains Vitaly Servetnik, coordinator of the Environmental Crisis Group. Experts monitor dangerous projects and can stop them at an early stage. Activists block bulldozers with their bodies, talk to neighbors, and deter officials and developers by force.

Since Russia recognized many wildlife protection NGOs as “foreign agents” or “undesirable” organizations in recent years, most environmental conflicts tend to shift to the plane of physical confrontation. At the same time, attempts at peaceful street protests are punishable by fines or administrative arrests.

When the full-scale war began, environmentalists were accused of acting in the interests of the West and Ukraine by destabilizing the country during “momentous” historical events. Fewer and fewer people are being detained for protesting because so many have simply been intimidated into eschewing civic activity of any kind.

At the same time, every month there are reports from all over Russia of the authorities using other forms of pressure on environmental activists, from beatings and property damage to criminal prosecution, branding as “foreign agents”, and the use of punitive psychiatry.

In 2024, Environmental Crisis Group experts recorded 95 instances of pressure against 72 eco-activists, 15 initiative groups, and 5 environmental organizations in 27 Russian regions. Moscow remains the leading region in terms of the number of conflicts throughout the five years of monitoring.

“Moscow and Moscow region are faced with the collision of interests between developers, whose opportunities are shrinking, and locals, who are more active than the national average and ready to stand up for their values,” explains Vitaly Servetnik.

At the same time, even with protest activity and arrests down, criminal prosecution of activists is becoming more frequent, with prison terms almost doubling in recent years. One of the campaign’s targets, Sergei Legkobitov, a conservationist and lawyer from Pyatigorsk, insists that the case against him was fabricated due to his participation in protests against the development of Mashuk Mountain. In 2024, Legkobitov was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison and fined $355,000.

In January 2024 in the Bashkortostan region, protests broke out when local environmental activist Fayil Alsynov was given a four-year prison sentence for “inciting interethnic hatred.” Many locals who came out onto the streets in his defense were handed shorter jail terms. Later that year, Marat Sharafutdinov, who in 2018, along with Alsynov, had defended the Kushtau Shihan chalk hill, was sentenced to nine years in a general-security prison. Officially, his crime involved organizing an extremist organization (the Bashkir nationalist association “Bashkort”) and preparation for hooliganism motivated by ethnic hatred. According to the prosecution, he allegedly intended to enter into a conflict with representatives of the Armenian diaspora.

For the sake of comparison, in 2021 the harshest reprisal against an environmentalist was the 2.5-year prison sentence imposed on Andrei Borovikov, a defender of Shies and coordinator of Alexei Navalny's headquarters in Arkhangelsk. Officially, his crime involved distributing “pornography” — in the form of Rammstein's Pussy video — on the VKontakte social network.

Servetnik explains how things have changed: “In the past, activists used to say, 'it’s worth getting fined in order to stop a landfill next to my house,’ or ‘so what if they detain me — my child has a lung disease.’ But when the risks increased so dramatically, people began to look for less conflictual ways of interacting with the state.”

Sometimes this “less conflictual” way involves appeals to Duma Deputies or the “People's Front” — or even recording messages to Vladimir Putin. Some may ask their fellow countrymen fighting in Ukraine to record an appeal in support of their cause. There are many video addresses from Russian soldiers who are outraged that while they are “shedding blood” in the war, the authorities back home are poisoning the land and water near their homes.

“With the beginning of the ‘special military operation’, the environmental movement has shifted from 'taking to the streets' to 'writing appeals,'” Morozov says. “All the environmentalists do now is barrage the prosecutor's office with appeals, go to the courts, and sometimes conduct fax attacks, sending hundreds of messages about an issue to some official at once to make sure they pay attention. There is also work with MPs, who sometimes help locals with environmental problems — except United Russia deputies, who are indifferent to such pleas. That's all that's left.”

“During the 2022 protests in Troitsky Forest, people taped Putin's portraits to birch trees so they wouldn't be cut down,” Servetnik recalls. “Locals are using all of the political tools they have. We're talking about a protest in a completely scorched political field.”

Activists are sure that this preemptive “scorching” of the political space was an important condition for Mayor Sobyanin's reform to eliminate protected areas. The Moscow City Duma that convened in 2017 was the first city parliament in years to have strong independent deputies with a good grasp of the city's environmental problems, and their help would have been very useful to today’s defenders of Moscow's forests.

However, these politically active people have either been expelled from the country, declared “foreign agents,” or simply pushed to the margins of political life. As a result, the current convocation of the Moscow City Duma is fully under the control of the capital's authorities. Some of the candidates who did not make it to the Moscow City Duma, such as Gleb Babich, Denis Rudykh, and Konstantin Konkov, joined the campaign in defense of protected areas as ordinary participants.

What next

A notable exception to the decline in protest is Bashkortostan, where even in wartime it is possible to hold an environmental rally with thousands of participants. In Morozov's opinion, the secret is the Bashkirs' national mentality: “I have been to Bashkortostan many times, worked with local activists and participated in protests, and I have the impression that for the Bashkirs, love for nature — and readiness to risk their lives defending it — is embedded in their cultural code.”

Overall, Servetnik is still optimistic about the prospects for environmental protest in today's Russia. He cites the case of the village of Poltavskaya in the Krasnodar Krai. In late 2023, after a year and a half of fierce struggle that involved beatings, detentions, searches, and even the suicide of a protest leader — 58-year-old businessman Andrei Garyaev shot himself after his company was fined $379,000 — locals forced the authorities to close a toxic dump.

In 2023, the Environmental Crisis Group counted more than 70 success stories of environmentalists who managed to protect a public garden, park, birch grove — or an entire nature reserve, like Khmelita in the Smolensk Region. Seventy environmental victories are almost 50% more than in 2022 (the list of environmental victories in 2024 has not yet been compiled). Sadly, many of these victories turn out to be temporary:

“Even if you have won, as long as you live on expensive land, there is no guarantee that another company will not come after it in a year or two,” explains Servetnik. “And even if you secure the status of a conservation area, no one can guarantee that the authorities will not change the legislation. Once you have started defending your habitat, your yard, your region, your country, that fight will never end. And it is clearly a political struggle, even if its participants do not realize this — or declare the opposite. When you challenge an oligarch by preventing them from profiting off the nature of your region, that's political action.”

Servetnik is convinced that environmental activism is the backbone of Russia's civil society. That’s why the authorities are cracking down on it along with other forms of civil activism. Participants in environmental protest campaigns are well aware of the extent to which environmental destruction is intertwined with Russia's other problems — and of how governance is the root cause.

According to a recent report, at least 80 environmental activists have been involved in anti-war protests since February 2022, 12 have received administrative arrests, 16 have been convicted, and nine others are on trial right now — including for state treason and participation in an illegal armed group.

The harshest sentence, six years and three months, was handed down to Vladislav Kraval, a Shies defender from Ukhta, for writing “F*ck war” in the city center and drunkenly calling the military enlistment office with a report of a terrorist attack. Ryazan animal rights activist Nikita Chernichkin and Moscow environmental activist Alexander Bakhtin each received six years in prison for making statements on social networks.

Repression against environmental activists who joined antiwar protests has been the toughest in the Arkhangelsk Region and Komi Republic — the regions affected by the Shies protests — and, of course, in Moscow.