Translated material
Swept up behind the forest
On July 22, defenders of the Khimki Forest gathered at the White House to submit an appeal to the government reception office demanding a meeting with one of the representatives of the executive branch. Five protesters were detained by the police, including favorites of law enforcement agencies, representatives of the Left Front Sergei Udaltsov and Konstantin Kosyakin. The leader of the Movement of Defenders of the Khimki Forest, Evgenia Chirikova, said that the Prosecutor General’s Office has a statement from the Commissioner for Human Rights in Moscow, Alexander Muzykantsky, which states that the project of the route passing through the lands of the Khimki Forest Park has not passed the legally required approval procedure with the Moscow government. They managed to convey the appeal to the government: the activists met with the deputy head of the department for working with citizens’ appeals of the Government of the Russian Federation, Sergei Kostyanov. He promised to respond within the time limits established by law.
Defenders of the forest, which has already begun to be cut down to build a highway through it, are demanding that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's order be reversed, according to which 145 hectares of the Khimki forest were transferred to transport land so that they could be cut down. Russian courts, of course, did not support the activists, but the complaint has already been sent to the Strasbourg court. Meanwhile, in the forest, where logging began without any permits, forest defenders set up real barricades. They remind you that, according to the results of an investigation by Transparency International, the route of the Moscow-St. Petersburg expressway, which makes a strange 10-kilometer loop into the Khimki forest, cutting an oak grove in the center, is of corruption interest to the Minister of Transport Igor Levitin. Meanwhile, if the authorities still manage to push through this plan and carry out deforestation, then all the other forests surrounding Moscow will follow the Khimki forest.