Posted on 12/14/2010 7:05:44 PM PST by NormsRevenge
MOSCOW (AFP) – The Russian government on Tuesday approved a plan to build a highway through a forest outside Moscow, in defiance of protests that had become a rare rallying cause for the opposition.
Demonstrations against the building of the new highway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg through Khimki forest had prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to postpone the project, in a rare nod by the state to popular pressure.
But Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said the government commission tasked with investigating the project had after all given its green light to the plan.
The commission approved the building of the highway "taking into account all the factors -- transport, economic, social and legal," Ivanov, who headed the panel, said in comments broadcast on state television.
"We believe that from the judicial point of view the proposed route is completely legal," he said.
Ecologists had decried the project for destroying an ecologically important part of a sensitive forest area that is a haven for wildlife in the heavily built-up Moscow region.
Four billion rubles (130 million dollars) will be paid as compensation for the ecological damage to the Khimki forest outside Moscow, Ivanov added. Some 500 hectares (1,200 acres) of new forest will be planted to replace the 100 destroyed, he said.
Medvedev's suspension of the project had also prompted speculation that he was at odds on the issue with his powerful predecessor Prime Minister Vladimir Putin who is seen as a supporter of the Khimki route.
Protests against the highway grew in magnitude in recent months, culminating in a rare thousands-strong rally in central Moscow in August led by veteran Russian rocker and Kremlin critic Yury Shevchuk.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If you build it, they will protest it.
Someone’s ox is always going to get gored.
They're lucky, in another day and time, they'd be in them woods,
in mass graves just for speaking up.
A view of the Khimki forest outside Moscow. The Russian government today approved a plan to build a new highway through the Khimki forest outside Moscow, in defiance of protests that had become a rare rallying cause for the opposition. (AFP/Andrey Smirnov)
The radical left which can be traced right back to the Kremlin has come home to roost. Suck it up Russia.
Have reason and irrationlity switched places?
There will be no forests to hide in anymore, like in the days of WW II when partisans and Jewish refugees took to the woods to fight the Nazi invaders.
I wonder how much ordinance from the great patriotic war will be dug up and accidently detonated from the seige of moscow by the germans?
Russia has always had a shortage of good roads. That saved the country from Napoleon and Hitler. Today, its a matter of survival to connect the center to the periphery.
Not if the reason is to stir up the rage of the irrational. Order out of chaos...of course, unfortunately that order is communism.
Probably very little because Hitler's troops were stopped about 5 miles to the west. They certainly didn't fight in the forest; the offensive was largely done by tanks, and Nazis wanted roads for them. Forests at that latitude (56 degrees North) are largely impassable for tanks because of large trees, ravines, rivers, marshes and other problems. Here is the map. I think the forest in question is between the river and the airport. It's plain obvious that a freeway, even a very wide one, can't be even seen on that scale. If anything, the forest will be better serviced and more accessible. But the green activists anywhere on the planet don't care about facts.
All this over 100 acres?
Nice Mustang...
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