Robbed at the dacha

On February 11, near the village of Praskoveevka near Gelendzhik, activists of the public organization “Ecological Watch in the North Caucasus” Dmitry Shevchenko, Suren Ghazaryan and Ekaterina Solovyova, as well as a journalist from the newspaper “Sobesednik” Riima Akhmirova were detained. This happened after they managed to penetrate the territory of the facility, which is popularly called “Putin’s dacha” - a palace on Cape Idokopas, in the construction of which, according to Novaya Gazeta, the current Prime Minister was involved.

They managed to penetrate because the barrier, which was usually lowered, was raised. Novaya correspondent Evgeniy Titov talks about this in his blog. The environmentalists were approached by employees of a private security company, who called employees of the Federal Security Service, led by Senior Lieutenant Albert Nikitin, as well as a certain foreigner who later approached - as Titov assumes, a Serb. Border guards led by Major Akinshin and district police officer Alexander Tsindrin, who did not interfere in what was happening, also came up.

Environmentalists were thrown to the ground. Private security company employees searched the car. Suren Ghazaryan’s mobile phone and laptop with modem were taken away so that he could not send anywhere the photographs taken on the spot. Dmitry Shevchenko's camera, flash drive and documents were taken away. Ekaterina Solovyova has a video camera. Rimma Akhmirova has a laptop. Where these things are is unknown.
After this, the environmentalists and the journalist were taken to the police station in the village of Divnomorskoye.

As Titov wrote on February 12, the detainees filed statements with the police department about robbery and violence by employees of the Federal Protective Service and private security company Rubin. They were released, but their things were not returned.

Shevchenko, as Titov writes, more than once turned to the district police officer Tsindrina for help, but he turned away. Titov contacted Tsindrin, but he said: “I didn’t see anything of this.”

The palace belongs to Idokopas LLC, whose owner is Nikolai Shamalov. Construction is being carried out in an ecologically sensitive area where plants listed in the Red Book grow. As Novaya Gazeta learned from businessman Sergei Kolesnikov, the construction of this palace, on Putin’s orders, was carried out with money initially provided by the Petromed company, of which Kolesnikov was a shareholder, for large projects in the field of public health care. Kolesnikov wrote an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev, in which he said that in 2008, then-President Vladimir Putin ordered the suspension of work on the projects and all available funds to be used for the construction of a palace (“rest home”) and the construction of a vineyard for the production of elite wines.