The Sakhalin Environment Watch announced it was closing after being listed by the Russian Ministry of Justice as a "foreign agent". The statement of the organization was published in its Telegram channel.
“Ecowatch has been protecting the nature of Sakhalin and the environmental rights of citizens since 1995. For 27 years we have been working to save salmon and bears, spawning rivers and taiga forests, killer whales and beluga whales, rare plants and endangered taimen, clean air and protected areas, green spaces in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and suburban forests. We conducted court cases, surveyed rivers, stopped poaching, identified pollution and sought punishment for violators, ”the message says.
According to the activists, over the years they have achieved a ban on the dumping of drilling waste into all seas of Russia, saved the last large tract of the Sakhalin forest from cutting down and created the Vostochny nature reserve to protect it, achieved a ban on slope-mountain-terraced technology in Sakhalin logging, insisted on liquidation of the Rosneft oil lake in the village of Katangli and the construction of treatment facilities at the oil fields of this state-owned company and much more.
On the eve of the Ministry of Justice for the second time included the organization in the list of "foreign agents". In 2015, they were already included in this register, but in 2017 they managed to prove that they did not have foreign funding, and achieve delisting. On December 16, the list also included the organization “Center for the Conservation and Study of Salmon Species and Their Habitats”, associated with Ecowatch.