Olga Pitsunova. Photo from personal Vkontakte account.Russia’s “foreign agents” law passed in 2012 has been a major hindrance for many NGOs by making their work illegal or cutting off their sources of funding. As a reminder, the law mandates that NGOs receiving financial support from abroad while engaging in “political activity” (a phrase clarified in 2015 to include virtually the entire spectrum of public work) must register as “foreign agents”. In 2014, the Russian Ministry of Justice was given, through an annex to the law, the right to enter NGOs on the register unilaterally.
Since the law’s entry into force, NGOs and their heads have been fined tens of millions of roubles, dozens of NGOs have shut down because of unmanageable fines, while many NGO leaders have had to pay the fines out of their own pockets. Olga Pitsunova, an ecological campaigner from the Volga town of Saratov, has been driven to the brink of survival.
Pitsunova is a well-known green campaigner who has organised and taken part in dozens of ecological campaigns and events, playing an active role in the activities of the Social-Ecological Union. For many years, Pitsunova led the Partnership for Development association (PfD), which was known for its environmental and educational programmes. Recently, Pitsunova was involved in a civic campaign against plans to increase the generating capacity of the Balakov nuclear power plant and discharge of water from the power plant’s cooling pond directly into the Volga River, against the expansion of the temporary nuclear storage facility of the Saratov branch of RosRAO in the Tatishchevsk area and its conversion into a permanent repository. She fought against real estate development in the Kumysnaya polyana nature reserve in the city bounds and against efforts to cut down trees in Saratov.
