Greenpeace Demonstrate Against Imports of Nuclear Waste into Russia

On March 24th Greenpeace activists demonstrated outside the French embassies in Moscow and St Petersburg. They were protesting about the import of nuclear waste into Russia. Having chained themselves to barrels depicting radioactive symbols, the activists were eventually taken into custody and were each fined 500 roubles.
 
The day before the demonstration,  the ship “Capitan Kuroptev” docked in St Petersburg with a cargo of depleted uranium hexafluoride on board. The radioactive cargo was unloaded and passed through the city's residential areas before being transported by the rail to the Siberian Chemical Factory located in the town of Seversk, Tomsk region.
 
The peaceful demonstration ended in a civil manner, but this is not always the case in Russia, and environmentalists quite literally take their lives into their hands, particularly when protesting about the activities of the powerful energy companies.
Following an attack by neo-Nazis on an environmentalist protest camp which left one dead and others wounded in July 2007, police spokesman Valery Gribakin dismissed the incident as "mere hooliganism". The campers, near the city of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region in south-eastern Siberia, some 2600 miles east of Moscow, were protesting about the reprocessing of nuclear waste at a state-owned facility in the city. Uranium from a plant in Kazakhstan is to be enriched for export purposes at the centre, which is just 60 miles from the southern tip of Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake.
Gribakin is well known to those of us who monitor the way in which the Russian state deals with dissent: In Moscow two months previously, a demonstration by 2000 people opposed to the Putin regime was broken up by 9000 baton-wielding riot police. Dozens were subjected to violent assault, and dragged away to police cells. Gribakin described the incident as a "provocation", and claimed that protesters had daubed themselves in tomato ketchup. Gribakin also described as a "provocation" an incident in November 2007 in Ingushetia, when three journalists and a human rights activist investigating the fatal shooting of a child by security forces two weeks earlier were abducted and severely beaten by masked gunmen.
 
Speaking about the astonishing number of journalists murdered since Putin came to power - many of whom were critical of the former president - Gribakin claimed that most of the deaths could be put down to "private disputes".
 
 
Photo: copyright Greenpeace