One member of the settlement told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper that the dozens of residents on hunger strike are demanding that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin come to the valley to meet with them, since “nothing is being resolved on the local level.”

Negotiations are currently underway between the protesters and regional official Aleksandr Zhigalko. Police officers were also on the scene of the hunger strike on Wednesday.

Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister and Sochi native who lost his April 2009 bid for Sochi mayor to Kremlin-backed candidate Anatoly Pakhomov amidst numerous fraud allegations, explained on his blog how the hunger strike should come as no surprise considering the travails put upon thousands of Imeretinskaya Valley residents since the region was picked to be one of the primary sites for the Olympics:

The reason for the hunger strike is that people are being required to pay 2 to 5 million rubles [$64-159 thousand] out of pocket for a forced move to new housing. For this, the authorities, in a way that is particularly perverse, are offering to “help” the disadvantaged by arranging mortgages for them.

The people have been driven to despair, which is understandable.

For long years they lived in their homes by the sea, grew fruits and vegetables on their plots of land, raised their children, worked, studied, and didn’t plan on going anywhere.

Then Putin decided to hold the winter Olympics in the subtropics, that is to say there in the Imeretinskaya Valley – in the warmest place not only of Russia, but of the city of Sochi.

Then the epic of resettlements began.

The draconian “Olympic law” was adopted that allows evictions from houses and seizures of land to be done by force. They began to intimidate people by saying that OMON riot police were going to come and throw them out all through the night. Then they built poisonous phenol houses in [the resettlement area of] Nekrasovka (they had a few victims in the Lame Horse [night club fire]). Then they valued the homes to be worth 33-35 thousand rubles [$1052-1116] per cubic meter, while the homes where the people live now are worth 20-25 thousand rubles [$638-798] per cubic meter. Then they demanded that they pay the difference.

The Olympics are a celebration.

The games themselves and preparations for them cannot be accompanied by harassment and violence. It contradicts the Olympic Charter and the spirit of the Olympic movement.

Whey must people suffer for Putin’s Olympic fraud?

It is worth noting that in March 2010, the newspaper Gazeta reported that workers building the resettlement homes in Nekrasovka were fired after striking in response to managers withholding their pay. The workers who remained, says the newspaper, have had to resort to selling their personal items to afford bread. Others have handed their passports over to store owners as collateral for food, making it impossible for the workers, some of whom hail from parts of Siberia, to leave Sochi before paying back their debts. The Nekrasovka workers went on strike after workers at a second resettlement site went on hunger strike for the same reason.

Vladimir Markin, official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said that investigator Sergei Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty. If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.

Trifonova, who suffered from diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility last Friday. The businesswoman had been detained since December 2009, when she was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Her lawyer alleges that Trifonova was intentionally denied medical care so that she would die, immediately giving rise to comparisons in the Russian press to the case of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer died last November, also in Matrosskaya Tishina, and also allegedly due to intentionally denied medical care. Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officials admitted partial responsibility in that case.

After Magnitsky’s death, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered massive layoffs from FSIN. Among those, says FSIN head Aleksandr Reymer, was supposed to have been Matrosskaya Tishina manager Fikret Tagiev. The newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday, however, that Tagiev remains in charge of the facility to this day. FSIN officials in Moscow did not confirm whether or not this was the case.

President Medvedev ordered a federal investigation into Trifonova’s death on Saturday. In the meantime, at least two people have been fired in connection with the incident – Deputy Manager Aleksandr Filippov at Moscow’s regional investigative agency (and one of Pysin’s supervisors) and Valery Ivarlak, who also worked at the agency.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the newspaper Gazeta that charging Pysin with negligence would sidestep his actual crime.

“I’m going to insist that it wasn’t negligence; there was clearly a direct intent here,” said the lawyer. In an earlier statement to the advocacy group Justice, Zherebenkov detailed how Pysin removed Trifonova from a Moscow hospital against doctors’ orders and sent her to a hospital 75 kilometers outside of Moscow that lacked the equipment she needed to survive. “I’m going to demand that he be charged with abuse; he knew perfectly well where he was sending her, and he should answer to the fullest extent,” he told Gazeta.

Zherebenkov said that he plans to have the proper documentation prepared by next Tuesday to request that Pysin be charged with abuse of his official authority – an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Also on Tuesday, a group of prominent human rights advocates from the Russian Association of Independent Observers addressed a letter to President Medvedev demanding that those responsible for Trifonova’s death be brought to justice. The signatories included Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Andrei Babushkin, Valery Borshchev, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksandr Goncharenko.

Speaking to the online news site Kasparov.ru, Borshchev lamented that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death. This allowed the situation to happen again.” He added that there was more blame to go around than just on Investigator Pysin. Odintsovsky City Court Judge Olga Makarova, for one, had stated publically that she wouldn’t grant Trifonova’s bail request unless she plead guilty.

The letter also includes a list of illnesses and asks the president to authorize a ban on allowing anyone suffering from them to be held in a pretrial detention facility. Right now, the list only applies to convicted criminals.