MOSCOW – Fifteen years ago, Russian NGOs were still urging against Russia joining the Aarhus Convention because the environmental legislation of the 90s according them wide berth to receive ecological information and the right to take part in decision-making processes.

Alexander Nikitin, Chairman of the Environmental Rights Center (ERC) Bellona will attend a summons by prosecutors in St. Petersburg who have leveled various charges against the organization for alleged violations of health and fire codes as part of the intensified efforts by the Kremlin to hobble Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding.

Bellona is calling for a debate on the role of Norway’s Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) amid suggestions that only pressure from supervisory bodies compel the government agency to pursue critical legal investigations of environmental crimes.

From the 22nd to the 25th of April, members of the Bellona Carbon Capture and Storage were in Canada to visit the soon-to-be-operational Boundary Dam and Quest CO2 Capture and Storage (CCS) projects in Saskatchewan.

Prosecutors in St. Petersburg again refused to provide the Environmental Rights Center (ERC) Bellona’s executive director, Nikolai Rybakov, with any information concerning the disposition of a number of so-called administrative violations levied against the organization in connection with Russia’s ongoing nit-picking of NGOs under an onerous new law.

Prosecutors in St. Petersburg Tuesday finally turned over their complete list of alleged administrative infringements of fire and heath codes to Artyom Alexeyev, lawyer for the Environmental Rights Center (ERC) Bellona, and handed down a summons to the group’s director to appear at the prosecutor’s office on Monday, May 13, for the beginning of administrative proceedings that could end in a $20,000 fine.

MOSCOW – Just one day before Russia, Ukraine, Belarus – and, indeed, many across the rest of the world – remembered the victims of the April 26, 1986 catastrophe at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin reiterated plans for building 25 new nuclear reactors. The following day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon talked about the plight of 330,000 people displaced by the tragedy, and the suffering of millions still residing on affected territories. The UN’s secretary general must be better informed of Chernobyl’s effects – or is he simply more humane than Putin?

MINSK – Still bent on plowing ahead with the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant, Minsk remains intolerant of any opposition to the project – even on the day commemorating the Chernobyl disaster, when protesters taking part in a sanctioned rally against the construction ran into often violent scrapes with government security services and blockades and detentions of environmentalists and reporters.

ST. PETERSBURG – A rural gathering that recently brought together residents of the villages of Muslyumovo, Brodokalmak, Russkaya Techa, and Nizhne-Petropavlovskoye, all located in the vicinity of the notorious nuclear reprocessing facility Mayak, in Chelyabinsk Region, resulted in a list of demands that the 120 participants feel must be heard by federal and regional authorities – grievances that have been barely addressed in the fifty years of local inhabitants’ desperate plight in what is deemed the most contaminated place on the planet.