Last week the Moscow City Duma made an official request to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin about protection of Khimky forest against felling. The deputies ask that the forest gets a status of a specially protected territory and that the project of construction of the toll highway Moscow-St Petersburg gets revisited, so that it does not go through the territory of the Khimky woodland park. The text of appeal says “Moscow City Duma recognizes the need in a highway of a new type between the two largest economic centers in Russia. Nonetheless, the Moscow forest shelter belt must not be damaged in the process”.     

The addressee of the appeal has been chosen very sensibly, as it takes a permission by the Russian government to cut down thousands hectares of leafy forest in order to build a highway there. 

Such permission being not given yet, the felling has already begun.

Last Monday certain workers felled down about 40 bushes near the St George Spring and damaged the roots of century-old oaks. They pretended to have been carrying on excavations. The local dwellers called the ecological police and it established that the “archeologists” did not have necessary documents. At the end of April, near the village of Vashutino some workers destroyed half a hectare of forest, acting without any authorizing documents. Also felled was a birch grove near the village of Terekhovo.

“They are in a hurry and they bite off pieces of forest from different sides” says Evgenia Chirikova, an activist of the group protecting the Khimky Forest. “By the time the government takes a decision about our forest, it might not be existing any more”.   

“Laying the highway on the territory of the wood is not necessitated technically. Even in its official responses the ministry of transportation admits that the current project was approved on the basis of ‘technical-economic analysis’, i.e. it’s just the matter of simplicity and saving the money” says the appeal by ecological activists to Dmitry Medvedev, signed by 12,000 people. “The issue of observing the ecological rights of citizens, of the health of the current and the next generations is not considered at all with such interpretation of the question”.