The tree-felling operation at Tomino has already started, despite protests by residents. Source: Stop GOK. Twelve kilometres from the city of Chelyabinsk, the Russian Copper Company (RMK) is planning to build a new ore mining and enrichment plant. This Urals city, where local residents claim there’s already nothing to breathe, is protesting how it can. But so far, they haven’t been successful in stopping RMK’s advances.
Most of all, residents of Chelyabinsk and its surrounding villages are concerned by the tree-felling that’s already happening near the construction site — the green zone that allows one of Russia’s most polluted cities to breathe. Thus, in 2017, nearly 4,000 residents filed a suit with the Chelyabinsk regional government to revoke the act permitting the zoning change that transferred these forests into a different category (which allows the company to cut down the trees near the site). But on 1 August, the Chelyabinsk regional court decided against the residents, and the forest will continue to fall.
Perhaps the struggle against the Russian Copper Company is doomed to fail because it’s so hard to identify its real owners — a situation familiar to many environmental activists. RMK’s shareholders are offshore firms registered in Cyprus, and the company is directed by Igor Altushkin (Russia’s 47th richest businessman, according to Forbes). Indeed, many residents of the South Urals call RMK the “Cyprus Copper Company”. Despite the fact that the levels of copper at Tomino, the proposed site for the mining and enrichment plant, are very low, RMK pursues its commercial interests fiercely. It seems in the long term the company intends to expand into mining silver and other precious metals. RMK is clearly attracted by the developed industrial infrastructure, which has long been in place in the region.
