#Yevgeny Vitishko

[inkisadream]

Before the games even ended, officials announced plans to spend another $7 billion to shore up already crumbling Olympic structures through 2016. Sochi National Park is covered in construction debris dumped by subcontractors of Olympstroi, the Kremlin-formed company that built Sochi's iconic stadiums. The village of Akhshtyr, in whose quarry Russian Railways dumped toxic waste while building a high-speed train for Olympic fans, still has no running water. The 160 or so people who live there collect rainwater to drink and bathe.

Visiting My Friend in Putin's Prison Camp

[amnestydeutschland]

Jewgeni Witischko, wollte die Umweltschäden durch die Bauarbeiten für die Winterspiele in Sotschi nicht schweigend hinnehmen. Für eine seiner Protestaktionen muss er jetzt für drei Jahre in ein Straflager. 

Die russischen Behörden verwandeln die Olympischen Ringe in Handschellen. Fordert die sofortige Freilassung von Witischko: http://www.amnesty.de/witischko

[therakyatpost]

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Amnesty urges Russia to release jailed Olympic critic

MOSCOW

Amnesty International has urged Russia to immediately release from prison a leading activist who criticised the environmental damage caused by the Sochi Olympic Games.

Yevgeny Vitishko was sent to a penal colony for three years on Wednesday for damaging a fence in a verdict widely condemned by rights groups as an attempt to silence a prominent critic of the Sochi Games.

“Amnesty International is convinced that Vitishko is a prisoner of conscience and he must be set free immediately and without any further conditions,” the London-based watchdog said in a statement sent late Saturday.

Vitishko and his group Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus (EWNC) have repeatedly raised concern about the harm caused by massive Olympic building projects in once-pristine wooded and mountain areas of the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The geologist was convicted in 2012 of damaging a fence during a protest against the construction of what the activists believe is a mansion for the region’s governor in a public forest.

He received a three-year suspended sentence but was this week ordered to serve that term in a penal colony after breaking the parole terms of the original sentence.

“This is the latest step in a lengthy campaign by the Russian authorities against the ecologists of the Krasnodar region where the Winter Olympic Games are being held, with the aim of preventing them from talking about the environmental damage caused to the region,” Amnesty International said of his jailing.

On Saturday, the International Olympic Committee said that it believed Vitishko’s jailing was not related to the Games after seeking clarification from the Russian authorities.

But Human Rights Watch has said his conviction was “politically motivated from the start” and a bid to silence a persistent critic of the Sochi Games, the biggest event to be held in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.