Nakhodka

Nakhodka is a port city of about 150,000 residents in the Far East of Russia. If you google Nakhodka protests in English, you’re going to get just one relevant result for the past week, a report with an embedded video on a Russian-language site. Googling in Russian would get you many more hits, such as Meduza‘s report.  Searching YouTube, you’d probably find this video as well.

Locals are protesting against a new fertilizer plant that’s going to be built on the outskirts of the city. It looks like Gazprom is going to supply gas from Sakhalin for use as feedstock to produce nitrogen fertilizers and methanol. With proper protections and modern technology, it shouldn’t be a dangerous polluter but if I were a local resident, I wouldn’t be so sure and I wouldn’t trust its owners’ reassuring claims.

Naturally, residents are taking to the streets and, predictably, some are getting arrested. But they know it’s not futile: non-violent resistance pays off if you’re lucky. For one, the Shiyes protests in Komi the southeast of the Arkhangelsk region eventually forced the authorities to drop their plans for that giant garbage dump.

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *