Daily Journal:

First of all, I would like to express my bewilderment that United Russia is beginning to behave somewhat inappropriately. Yuri Mikhailovich is one of the active members of this party, but for some reason on August 26 the party called on the president to stop cutting down the Khimki forest, and this week we see articles of this kind from United Russia. I would like to say: “Comrades, make up your mind! What do you want? Are we preserving the lungs of Moscow or are we still destroying them?”

Today, unfortunately, we do not see that the president’s order is being implemented properly. We see only profanity and a depiction of some kind of activity. This is simply the use of all kinds of administrative resources in order to push through the existing option for laying the route. Nothing else. We were even forced today to turn to the Prosecutor General’s Office, because a lot of Khimki residents came to us with complaints that, using administrative resources, they were forced to participate in all sorts of events like pseudo-public hearings on September 2, to sign for the destruction of the Khimki forest. We believe that this is a disgrace and that public opinion cannot be imitated in this way. This will simply cause a more severe rejection of the existing government. We also see that no one from United Russia raises the issue of the corruption component of this project, which is quite serious. We don’t understand why it suddenly became impossible to use the lands of the Molzhaninovsky district, about which so much is said. Today this is one of the important questions, and it must be answered. It is also not entirely clear what happened to other corrupt studies. Let me remind you that the corruption component was found by Transparency International and at the level of the Minister of Transport Igor Levitin. To date, no one is giving answers, and the study on corruption, which the president asked to conduct back in the spring, also did not end in anything. And why now, at such a good moment, no one even mentions corruption, except for us, environmentalists, is unclear.

And, of course, I would like to note once again that the route through the Khimki forest is guaranteed to destroy it - this is the conclusion of the Moscow Department of Natural Resources. Today we know for sure that if it passes through the Khimki forest, then there will be no forest here; it will not withstand the harmful anthropogenic load. And how we will survive the next similar summer - then we were surrounded by a ring of forests, and yet, for a month and a half we could not breathe, we were breathing smoke - it is not clear. Now competent politicians need to reconsider the importance of Moscow’s forest protection belt, and not participate in its destruction.