Scenic city that Putin is turning into vast waste dump

Residents demand Russian president stops endless stream of Moscow rubbish that’s ‘poisoning’ them

THE ancient city of Volokolamsk, 75 miles west of Moscow, is celebrated as the place where troops under Gen Ivan Panfilov resisted a Nazi tank division in 1941. Today, people in Volokolamsk are taking on a different kind of “tank”. That’s what they’ve nicknamed the lorries that bring rubbish from the capital to the sprawling dump here, a lucrative business in which friends of Vladimir Putin and relatives of top officials are involved.

The size of the landfill was once commensurate with the population of 23,000 in this scenic city of white churches. But as the economy boomed in the 2000s and the capital ballooned to more than 12 million people, its waste overflowed into the surrounding region. Trucks started dumping large amounts of rubbish here last year.

Now, as the train approaches Volokolamsk, you can often smell a hint of rotten eggs characteristic of hydrogen sulphide.

After a blowout of landfill gas recently, 150 children had to be treated for sudden illnesses.

Thousands of ailing residents have been demanding the dump be closed. At least nine cities in the Moscow region have rallied against landfills. Ten people were arrested blocking bin lorries in the suburb of Kolomna on

Thursday.

On a recent weeknight, locals gathered at a monument of an exploding Nazi tank near Yadrovo, the village outside Volokolamsk and the site of the dump.

“We’ll fight until we achieve something. Why should people have to move away? It’s like war in peacetime,” said Karina Gadzhiyan, 39, a teacher.

Most locals are hoping Mr Putin will intervene in Volokolamsk like he did in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha last June. When residents complained to state television cameras about a 50-hectare landfill there that has been called the “waste Everest”, he ordered it to be shut down.

But Mr Putin has been silent on Volokolamsk and there has been little success in tackling the root of the problem and reducing the 40 million tons of rubbish Moscow produces each year.

Natalya Zaveriyeva, 50, said the president failed to intervene “because his friends are involved” in the rubbish industry. “They need to make money,” she said. At a time when countries like the UK are trying to eliminate plastic waste in the next quarter-century, Russia has virtually no limits on plastic packaging, and only 4 per cent of waste is recycled.

“There’s so much coverage about the Skripals’ problem, the poisoning, but 20,000 people are being poisoned in our city and the authorities don’t even react,” said Nadezhda Kaskevich, 44, whose two granddaughters have been suffering headaches and nosebleeds she blames on the dump.