ANAPA, Russia — Artyom, 21, vividly remembers the night in February when the volunteer headquarters, stationed to tackle a fuel oil spill in the Krasnodar region, was engulfed in flames.
“Someone shouted, ‘The headquarters is on fire!’ At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. Smoke was everywhere. Volunteers broke down the door and rushed to grab hazmat suits and respirators. I called the fire department, but by the time they arrived, the building was already destroyed,” Artyom said.
He recalled how volunteers, including members of the ruling United Russia party, helped fight the fire. Standing nearby was Igor Kastukevich, a Russian-appointed senator from the occupied region of Kherson, who had been put in charge of overseeing the cleanup.
“He was shouting at everyone, telling them not to record the situation on their phones,” Artyom said. “He already had issues with us volunteers. The first time he visited, he saw the message ‘Freedom to the seas, fuel oil to the Kremlin’ written on the bathroom wall. He didn’t like that.”
Later, volunteers found United Russia campaign leaflets among the ashes.
“We even joked that it was United Russia activists who set the fire and left the message as a hint. Some believe it was them. It’s suspicious that just days before the fire, one of the coordinators was warned about us independent volunteers and told we might be kicked out,” he added.
Protests Amid Environmental Disaster
A few days before the fire, a banner reading “Government and oil — fuel oil and death” appeared near the Rosneft oil company’s office in Krasnodar. Police launched an investigation, but the culprits were never found.
These small protests have emerged sporadically as volunteers have worked tirelessly to clean up one of Russia’s worst environmental disasters in recent years.
On December 15, 2024, two aging Russian tankers sank in the Kerch Strait during a storm, spilling more than 9,000 tons of heavy fuel oil and polluting coastlines from Crimea to Georgia.
The hardest-hit area was Krasnodar, where thousands of seabirds, including endangered species, are believed to have died. This spill sparked a wave of independent volunteer efforts across Russia and generated widespread public outrage.
Volunteers from all over the country flocked to the southern Russian coasts and Crimea to help. Among them were pensioners, nationalists, pro-war activists, environmentalists, and anti-war Russians — many of whom had participated in past opposition protests.
This independent initiative, operating outside government control, has clearly irritated officials, who view it as a challenge to their authority.
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