Recent years have in fact seen a steady decline in the nation's environmental awareness, said the head of London-based Greenpeace's Russian branch, Ivan Blokov.

"Concern for the environment has actually decreased since Vladimir Putin was elected president" in March 2000, Blokov said.

"The authorities and the legal system consider ecological crime merely as petty offenses and devote ever less attention to the environment," he added.

Over the past three years, Russia's environmental track record has indeed been grim. In 2000, Putin canceled Russia's Environment State Committee, transferring its powers to the natural resources ministry.

Russian green campaigners say the ministry has shown more interest in marketing and selling the country's natural resources than in protecting the environment.

And in 2001, parliament passed a controversial law allowing foreign nuclear wastes to be imported and recycled in Russia, ignoring loud protests from ecologists.

"Environmentalists have no political power in Russia, and there is no influential Green party," said Olga Belskaya, the head of a non-governmental organization based in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Baikal Environmental Wave (BEV).

Moreover, environmentalists are frequently harassed by the Russia's FSB security agency, she added.

Last November, FSB agents raided BEV's office, accusing the NGO of having disclosed classified information. They seized as evidence a map showing the location of a secret plant producing enriched uranium in the Siberian city of Angarsk.

But Belskaya said BEV had been using the map with the full knowledge of the local administration to draw a study of radioactive pollution. Furthermore, the study had been completed eight months before the FSB raid, said Jennie Sutton, a British woman who co-heads BEV together with Belskaya.

In fact, Sutton added, the real reason for the raid was probably the fact that BEV had been opposing plans for a cross-border oil pipe line linking Angarsk to the Chinese city of Daqing, saying it could pollute lake Baikal, the world's largest preserve of fresh water.

"The FSB wanted to prevent our work. A local FSB official even criticized us in the media, claiming that BEV opposed Russian oil exports to China," said Sutton, who has been living in Russia for several years and founded BEV in

The defense of the environment used to be very popular in the late 1980s, but many ecologists became frustrated by the lack of immediate progress and abandoned the cause.

Starting in the late 1990s, an increasing number of green activists have been accused of spying for foreign countries.

In 1996, former navy officer Alexander Nikitin was arrested by the FSB during a probe into the Norway-based environmental group Bellona's activities in the Arctic Circle port of Murmansk.

He was charged with treason and espionage and held for 10 months for his part in the publication of a Bellona report on nuclear pollution on the Kola peninsula, the principal base of Russia's fleet of nuclear submarines.

Nikitin was finally cleared of all charges by the Russian Supreme Court in 2000 after a four-year judicial saga.

In 1997, Grigory Pasko, a correspondent for the Russian Pacific Fleet's newspaper, was arrested by the FSB for passing footage of the navy dumping nuclear waste to a Japanese television channel.

In 2001, he was sentenced to four years in a hard labor camp for espionage, a charge he has always denied, and was freed on parole last January after serving two-thirds of his sentence.

TERRA.WIRE