Environmentalists appealed to the prosecutor’s office because of land works in the upper reaches of the Mzymta River

The Expert Council on the reserve case sent a letter to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Igor Krasnov with a request to organize an inspection in the Krasnopolyansky district forestry of the Sochi National Park. As follows from the text of the appeal, here “unidentified persons violated the soil cover from May to July 2023, which led to the destruction and spoilage of the soil.” Ecologists refer to publicly available satellite imagery and claim that the area of ​​disturbed soil cover is 90,000 square meters. m. “The indicated site is located in the upper reaches of the Mzymta River, which is the main source of water supply for the Adler district of the city of Sochi, and is one of the most valuable sections of the Sochi National Park,” the council notes.

The Expert Council on Reserve Affairs was established in January 2023. It brings together renowned scientists and experts in the field of nature conservation. The goal of the organization is to “assistance in improving” environmental legislation and “provide support to government agencies in the fight against its violations.”

The discussed work is being carried out without obtaining a positive conclusion from the state environmental expertise of the federal level by the design documentation, which is a violation of the federal law “On Environmental Expertise”, the authors of the appeal say. The damage caused to natural complexes, according to their calculations, exceeds 1.5 billion rubles.

“Kommersant” has already cited the opinion of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Viktor Danilov-Danilyan that interference in the landscape of the floodplain of the Mzymta River, which flows in the Caucasian Reserve, can lead “to the second Krymsk” (see the issue of 24 April). “In 2012, almost 200 people died there in a couple of hours of nighttime flooding. Sochi is waiting for the same thing,” the ecologist said at a meeting in the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, dedicated to the development of tourism and transport structure in the Caucasus. Then the representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Irina Makanova, called the concerns of environmentalists groundless, but noted that the department listens to the conclusions of Mr. Danilov-Danilyan.

Polina Yachmennikova