The ALDE Group, Press Release, 13/02/2014
Yesterday 12 February 2014, one of Sochi’s principal environmental activists and member of ALDE Party Russian member Yabloko Evgeny Vitishko, was sentenced to a three-year imprisonment by the Krasnodar Regional Court for spray-painting an illegally erected construction fence in the middle of a nature reserve.

Yabloko member Evgeny Vitishko has been an active opponent of Sochi’s Olympic construction, declaring that contractors had not conducted adequate ecological analyses of the fields they were constructing or neither of the long-term consequences of that work. Mr Vitishko has closely analysed the damage that had been done to local beaches, as well as to Sochi’s air quality and water. The Krasnodar Regional Court has blatantly neglected the order of the Supreme Court to conduct a new examination of this criminal case. The YABLOKO party is outraged by such arbitrary sentence as it yet represents another episode in the ongoing wave of reprisals against civil society activists. Governor Alexander Tkachyov has been settling accounts with his opponents, which looks especially cynical against the background of the Olympics.

The ALDE Party and its Russian Member Party YABLOKO urge the Russian federal authorities and the international community to pay specific attention to the lawlessness and arbitrary ruling taking place in the Krasnodar region, irreparably damaging the reputation of the Winter Olympics.

They demand the Public Prosecutor Attorney General to immediately appeal against the verdict: environmental activist Evgeny Vitishko must be immediately released!