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KOROLYOV: After getting fined for her environmental protest against a road being built through a national park near Moscow, Irina Kuriseva is back to check on the construction.
“We only want to defend nature,” the 62-year-old told AFP at the Losiny Ostrov (Elk Island) park, a 129-square-kilometer nature reserve with hundreds of species of wildlife including endangered birds.
With dissident voices in Russia almost totally silenced and as the country presses on with its massive military offensive in Ukraine, environmental activism has become highly risky.
“The authorities have become completely indifferent” and laws have been “softened” in favor of polluters and property developers, said one activist, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In the outskirts of Moscow, the issue has become particularly acute as developers continue to build new homes and residents commuting to the capital find themselves stuck in traffic jams for hours.
In Korolyov, a town of 200,000 people, the authorities decided to build a highway that passes through the national park to ease congestion and give access to a new housing development.
In July, Kuriseva and five other activists blocked machinery spreading asphalt in the forest.
They were arrested by police and fined, after spending a night at the police station.
“We were interrogated like criminals who had killed someone,” said Kuriseva, a local resident.
Russian law prohibits construction in national parks but local authorities got around it by arguing that the project consisted of “repairs” to an existing road.
Dmitry Trunin, an environmental defense lawyer with more than 25 years of experience, said this argument amounted to “falsification and fraud.”
“There was never a road there,” he said, explaining that there had only been an unpaved track used by forest rangers which then became just a path through the forest.
Kuriseva said that “asphalt powder” was placed on the path in an attempt to classify it as a road.
The highway is due to be completed by March 2026 at a cost of 5.4 million euros ($6.3 million), according to the regional transport ministry.


Mikhail Rogov, a 36-year-old engineer who also took part in the protest with Kuriseva, said the judge was “smiling” to the defendants in court.
“She told us: ‘If you don’t want any problems, sign these papers, pay your fines and you’re free’,” he said.
The judge, Maria Loktionova, had in 2023 sentenced another environmental activist, Alexander Bakhtin, to six years in prison for three posts on social media criticizing the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Despite the crackdown on dissent, activists opposed to the highway have sought to appeal to President Vladimir Putin to help their cause.
In June, around a thousand people queued outside the presidential administration building in Moscow to submit their complaints.
Putin visited the national park in 2010 and fed a baby elk with a bottle, telling reporters that nature was “a gift from God” that must be “protected.”
The tone from the Kremlin is very different in 2025.
“This is a question for the regional authorities. Don’t get the president involved,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in July when asked about the project by AFP.
Environmental protection “should not be a barrier to development and the comfort of the lives of citizens,” he said.
Trunin said it has become “harder and harder to defend the truth in court.”
“The power vertical takes decisions and law enforcement and monitoring bodies obey,” he said.

HENOKO: Okinawa resident Hiromasa Iha can still recall the screams of his classmates and teachers after a US military jet crashed into his elementary school, killing 18 people more than six decades ago.
As people globally commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, the 72-year-old retired businessman is among many residents who oppose the American troops stationed on their island ever since.
He joins dozens of islanders in near-daily protests against the US forces.
The United States has around 54,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, mostly on Okinawa, and a string of incidents over the years, including sexual assault cases, have angered residents.
“For us, these crimes and accidents are not someone else’s business, and we feel a pressing unease that we can’t predict when these things may happen again,” he told AFP, recalling the 1959 school incident.
“We want the bases to go.”
The island region, a subtropical paradise with a huge tourism industry, hosts 70 percent of all American bases in Japan and serves as a key US outpost to monitor China, the Taiwan Strait and the Korean peninsula.
The bloody Battle of Okinawa near the end of the war led to the US occupation of the island until 1972, during which troops seized private land in Okinawa to expand their presence in what is locally known as a “bayonet and bulldozer” campaign.
During the Cold War, US troops in Okinawa were seen by Washington as a deterrent against the spread of communism.
Now, both Tokyo and Washington stress the strategic importance of Okinawa in the face of China’s territorial ambitions.
But residents have for years voiced their fury over a spate of crimes and accidents involving American soldiers and base personnel.
In 2024 alone, Okinawa police detained 80 people connected to the base — such as US soldiers or military contractors — including seven for severely violent crimes.
Okinawa erupted in anger after a 1995 gang rape of a 12-year-old girl by three US Marines.
In August 2004, a Marine helicopter crashed at a university in Okinawa, causing no injuries but amplifying fears of accidents.
In April 2016, a former Marine, who was working as a military contractor in Okinawa, raped and killed a 20-year-old woman.
And as recently as last month, a senior Marine officer visited the Okinawa government to apologize after a Marine was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman.
Opinion polls in Okinawa have historically shown that the majority of residents believe the rest of Japan must carry its fair share of the load when it comes to hosting the US military.
Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki routinely points out the island’s “excessive burden,” impacting the daily lives of residents.
But repeated calls on authorities to prevent crimes by US soldiers have fallen largely on deaf ears, said Junko Iraha, the chairwoman of a coalition of women’s groups in Okinawa.
“It’s not that we don’t like American people. We are saying, please do something about the bases,” she said.
When Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972, residents expected that US bases would be spread across Japan — a vision that never came true, she added.
Recent polls suggest growing resignation among the Okinawan public.
In a 2023 survey, nearly 40 percent of Okinawan survey participants said the anti-US base movement was powerless to change Tokyo’s policy.
But many Okinawan residents say they live in fear of crimes by American soldiers, with victims still trying to process their grief.
Takemasa Kinjo, 68, was a high school student when his mother was killed by a Marine in 1974 with a brick at their home where she operated a small bar.
“It is truly scary if you think crimes can happen in your neighborhood,” Kinjo said.
He also joined a recent protest at a Marine base that is being expanded into a secluded bay where dugongs and other protected species live.
He believes Okinawa — where base-related income accounts for just over five percent of its economy — can thrive thanks to tourism alone, with an increasing number of holidaymakers drawn to the area’s turquoise bays and coral reefs.
“There should be no base on Okinawa,” he said. “We don’t need new military facilities.”
Iha, whose elementary school was destroyed by a US jet, feels the need to explain to future generations what happened — and warn them it could happen again.
At the time of the crash, which also left more than 200 people injured, “everyone thought another war was starting,” he recalled.
Now, “every day, military jets fly over our houses, and we see helicopters making emergency landings,” said Iha.
“This is not something that only belongs in the past. This can happen again anytime.”