This story written by Anastasia Pestova originally appeared on Global Voices on May 18, 2026.
Environmental problems often seem too vast for ordinary people to confront: waste management reforms, water pollution, industrial development. This is why resistance almost always begins with something concrete — a river, a forest, a village, a road — as protecting nature becomes a way of protecting one’s home, health, and right to participate in decisions that directly shape everyday life.
In Russia, some citizens are pushing back against projects they believe have been threatening their water, land, and quality of life.
In the spring and summer of 2025, residents of the northern Karelian town of Kem learned about plans by local authorities and the state-owned enterprise Glavrybvod to establish trout farming sites on the Kem River. According to local media reports, the proposed site was located just a few kilometers upstream from the town’s water intake facility — a location residents feared could seriously affect drinking water quality.
Karelia is Russia’s leading trout-producing region, accounting for roughly half of the country’s farmed trout production and around 10 percent of its total fish output. But the industry’s economic benefits come with environmental costs: fish farming waste can pollute lakes, rivers, and coastal waters. For years, residents across the region have protested the expansion of aquaculture projects.
For local activists opposing the project, the issue was never an abstract anti-business campaign. It was about something immediate and tangible: public health, drinking water, and quality of life. Residents say that even now, water from household taps is often little more than what they describe as “technical water,” unsuitable for safe consumption. According to Karelia’s regional branch of Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s consumer safety watchdog, only 62 percent of the republic’s residents had access to safe drinking water in 2024.
A petition against the trout farm gathered 750 signatures, and residents eventually succeeded in drawing the attention of local authorities. In the autumn of 2025, during a public meeting attended by municipal officials and company representatives, locals voiced their opposition to the proposed fish farming sites on the Kem River. Shortly afterward, the company withdrew its application, citing a “tense situation.”
The outcome may not be final: the project could reappear later in a different form. But the conflict in Kem illustrates how environmental disputes often become about more than pollution or water quality alone. They also raise a broader question: why are decisions about the places where people live so often made without their participation?
In 2023, authorities in the Sysert district of Russia’s Sverdlovsk region approved plans for Yekaterinburg-Yug, a major waste management facility that would include a landfill and a waste-sorting complex. Local residents were outraged: the site was planned near residential areas and, they argued, could affect air, soil, and water quality while creating additional risks because of nearby peat deposits.
Residents of Sysert did more than organize rallies and pickets. Activists filed lawsuits, appealed to state agencies, and repeatedly attempted to initiate a local referendum. In June 2025, authorities and investors abandoned the construction plans, and in March 2026 the project was officially scrapped.
The victory did not come easily. Residents spent years building a campaign that combined legal action, public visibility, and sustained public pressure.
For many participants in similar environmental movements, an important precedent was the 2018 protest in Shiyes, a remote railway station in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region that became the site of one of the country’s most high-profile environmental conflicts.
Authorities planned to build a massive landfill near Shiyes to receive waste transported from Moscow. The issue quickly grew beyond a local infrastructure dispute. For many residents, it became a symbol of the unequal distribution of environmental burdens between Russia’s political center and its regions. The movement around Shiyes took on not only an environmental dimension, but also a political one: people were defending forests and land while demanding respect for regional communities and their right to have a say in decisions affecting them.
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Local residents, activists, and volunteers organized a round-the-clock protest camp, patrols, and mass demonstrations. What began in July 2018 as a local protest had, by 2019, evolved into the center of a broader anti-landfill movement. Solidarity actions in support of Shiyes took place in 30 regions across Russia.
In June 2019, construction of the landfill was temporarily suspended. A month later, on July 18, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on Russia to stop persecuting environmental activists in the Arkhangelsk region.
The landfill project was officially scrapped in 2020, and according to local authorities and media reports, the site was later designated for environmental restoration.
Victories in environmental conflicts rarely look dramatic. More often, they take the form of a permit being revoked, a project removed from a regional development plan, or an application quietly withdrawn. Yet such bureaucratic decisions can fundamentally reshape reality: once a project disappears from official documents, it no longer threatens a particular river, village, or forest.
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These stories matter not because they prove that protests always succeed — that would be too simple, and not entirely accurate — but because they show that local communities can exert influence when facing bureaucratic systems, powerful business interests, and official indifference.
Environmental movements become more powerful when they are rooted in lived experience. The stories of Kem, Sysert, and Shiyes show that environmental justice often begins with a simple question: who has the right to decide the future of the places people call home?
Even where individuals may seem powerless, their voices gain strength through solidarity, persistence, and a community’s determination to defend its land, water, and future.
However, the political climate of recent years has profoundly changed the conditions for any form of protest — including local movements centered on landfill projects, deforestation, or industrial construction. Today, participation even in small local campaigns increasingly requires personal courage. For this reason, it remains unclear what forms environmental activism in Russia will take in the future.
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