According to movement member Sergei Ageyev, ten environmentalists held an “exchange of information” with Posner at the house of activist Konstantin Fetisov in the outer-Moscow village of Gavrilkovo.

During the discussion, the movement’s leader, Yevgenia Chirikova, told Posner about their work to save the forest from a dubious highway construction project, and also brought to his attention attacks on activsts – including Fetisov – and multiple other human rights abuses by members of the project’s private security forces.

Chirikova made particular note that French contractor Vinci, party to the UN agreement on principles of business conduct, is involved in the project. Correspondingly, she said, the company is violating the UN agreement by taking part in a construction project that has involved multiple human rights violations.

In sum, Chirikova told Posner that the highway was an international project “that, by the way, is violating human rights,” and that the US should “react” to everything that happens around the Khimki Forest because Russia is a country that is “struggling for human rights and democracy.”

As part of his visit to Russia, Posner spoke on Ekho Moskvy Radion on October 12 and noted that the US generally blocks entry through its borders to anyone involved in demonstrated human rights abuses.

Left Front opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov said that demonstrators called for the government to file criminal charges in response to incidents of illegal tree felling. They also demanded that government authorities sit down for negotiations on the construction of a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, currently planned to go through the forest.

Udaltsov noted that there are eleven possible alternative routes for building the highway.

Demonstrators gathered around the Griboyedov monument on Moscow’s Chistie Prudy with posters of police officers and what they said were “bandits” who have physically assaulted Khimki Forest activists.

On May 23, Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights held an emergency session to discuss a resolution to the ongoing conflict between environmentalists and highway construction workers in the Khimki Forest. The years-long conflict reached new levels of desperation in early May when three activists were injured in a raid by what are believed to have been private security forces hired by the company subcontracted to clear the forest. The raid came after some pieces of construction equipment were torched, allegedly by the activists.

“This is going to be an emergency session that will include representatives of every law enforcement agency and legal entity. It’s important to hear every side’s position,” said council member Kirill Kabanov.

Materials from the meeting will then be sent to President Dmitri Medvedev.

“He won’t be at the session. But the president reacts to all legal violations very seriously. Private security companies don’t have the right to beat people,” Kabanov said.

President Medvedev temporarily halted construction of the highway through the forest this past August. However, several months later Vice Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that construction would resume, citing reports by a government-organized commission.

Dozens of complaints of attacks on activists have been filed with Moscow regional police, but according to Gazeta.ru, not a single measure has been taken in response. Meanwhile, the activists claim that Khimki government officials and the local police are openly supporting the attackers.

Chirikova told the website that police came to her husband’s office and began taking documents without explaining what unit they belong to or on what basis they were conducting the search. A lawyer from the association Agora was sent to the firm to look into the matter.

“This is one hundred percent connected with our civil activities,” said Chirikova. “Our company has been around since 1992 and there were never any problems before.”

She explained that Aesop is an engineering company that deals with high-tech business and would unlikely be of any interest to law enforcement agencies. However, after Chirikova became an activist and founded the Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest, government authorities began to put pressure on the company from all sides. One example of this was when a bank denied Aesop credit after unknown persons pressured the bank.

Chirikova has previously reported that unknown persons sent letters supposedly from law enforcement officials to clients of the firm asking them not to use Aesop’s services. In addition, Russia’s Child Protection Service has threatened to take away her children, after supposedly receiving an anonymous tip that she was mistreating them – a known tactic used against activists and oppositionists in Russia.

On Tuesday, federal investigators said that Andrei Chernyshev, who heads Khimki’s department on public property and privatization, was arrested under suspicion of organizing Fetisov’s attack. Criminal investigators also detained 25-year-old Vyacheslav Kovalev and 28-year-old Andrei Kashirin, who are suspected of having carried out the attack.

Earlier in the day, RIA Novosti reported that a total of four figures had been detained in connection with Fetisov’s beating. The day before, reports surfaced that police had conducted searches in Khimki administrative buildings. While the Investigative Committee confirmed this information, the Khimki administration itself denied that any searches had occurred.

Konstantin Fetisov, leader of the Khimki branch of the Right Cause party and a staunch supporter of the preservation of the Khimki Forest, was attacked by unknown assailants on November 4. Repeated blows to the head from a baseball bat caused him to fall into a coma. On December 27, his wife, Marina Fetisova, reported that his condition was improving; Fetisov is now in “a state of deep stupor,” meaning he is not in a coma but basically does not respond to external stimuli.

The activists and ecologists who fought with Fetisov to preserve the Khimki Forest say the attack was clearly connected to his civic activities. Days after the attack, journalist Oleg Kashin, who had dedicated a significant amount of coverage to the Khimki Forest controversy, was also beaten nearly to death by two unknown men. An investigation is still ongoing.

Just past midnight on Saturday, Oleg Kashin was beaten by unknown assailants on a street close to his rented apartment. The attackers left the journalist with two broken shins, fractures on the upper and lower jaws, skull lesions, and broken fingers. However, they did not take Kashin’s money, tablet computer, or cell phone.

According to a janitor who witnessed the incident, Kashin was beaten by two people “not with their fists, but with some kind of object.”

The journalist is currently in an artificial coma and hooked up to an artificial lung in a Moscow hospital, where doctors fear that he may develop pneumonia. An operation on the victim’s skull revealed that his brain was undamaged. As of Saturday night, doctors said his condition was “extremely critical.”

Editors at Kommersant say the attack was most definitely connected to the journalist’s professional work.

“It is totally obvious that this was a planned action, naturally, connected with Oleg’s professional work,” said Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin. “They broke his fingers, legs; they wanted to cripple him. This wasn’t some kind of hold-up.” Mikhailin said he plans to “put the maximum amount of pressure on the investigation in order for it to be solved.”

Kashin’s recent articles have focused on a number of controversial topics, including political youth movements, the Khimki Forest, and high-ranking government officials.

Moscow city police filed a criminal suit early on Saturday for attempted murder, after reviewing security camera footage and interviewing witnesses of the attack. Later that morning, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered that the investigation be transferred to the direct control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.

“There has also been an order to take all measures to solve this crime,” reads a Kremlin press release.

A statement posted late Saturday on Kommersant’s website decried the fact that the murders of so many journalists in Russia often go unsolved:

The attack on Oleg Kashin is outrageous, but far from the only manifestation of the growing violence in the civil and political life of the country. Unfortunately, we only see the victims: the attackers go uncaught, and the ones who ordered it – unknown. The impunity stimulates further violence.

If the investigation of Oleg Kashin’s monstrous beating, despite the demands of Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev and the personal control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, ends in nothing, as has already happened with murder and beating investigations of other journalists in past years, it will effectively legalize the use of force.

Activists working to prevent the destruction of the Khimki Forest say that the attack on Kashin could be connected with another beating that occurred just a day earlier, when unknown assailants attacked environmental activist Konstantin Fetisov with a baseball bat late on Thursday night.

“My personal opinion is that Kashin suffered because of his journalistic work,” Khimki Forest activist Yaroslav Nikitenko told Gazeta.ru. “In our country, attacks don’t just happen. If I’m not mistaken, Kashin was the first correspondent to write a large article about the Khimki Forest in the newspaper Kommersant.”

Russia is widely considered one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work in the world. The press watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranks Russia as 140th out of 178 countries on its 2010 Press Freedom Index, and has called Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a “predator of press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia as the 4th deadliest country for journalists in the world, with 52 killings with confirmed motives since 1992.

He did, however, announce his resignation from United Russia – the country’s leading political party, head by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a written statement, the now ex-mayor said that he had been “subjected to a fierce attack by the state mass media” and “savage harassment,” which “were connected with the task of eliminating the mayor of Moscow from the political arena.” He then blamed United Russia for “not giving a member of the party any kind of support; [the party] did not demonstrate any desire to deal with and put a stop to the stream of lies and slander.”

Then, on late Tuesday, an entirely unexpected document was published by the opposition-leaning newspaper the New Times: a scathing letter from Luzhkov to President Medvedev, accusing the latter of “informational terror” and intentional slander, among other things. The harassment, he says, stemmed from two of Luzhkov’s letters concerning the Khimki Forest controversy that were published earlier this month. But the letters, in which Luzhkov backtracked on his original decision to stand with Medvedev in opposition to the forest’s destruction, were “not a reason, but an excuse” to get rid of him, Luzhkov asserts. “The task has been set: Get rid of him. The excuse is found. Act!” says the letter.

The Kremlin had already made about as much clear through a whisper campaign of anonymous tipsters to the Moscow press over the past month, as well as a propaganda campaign run through the state-run media. Denouncing Luzhkov’s Khimki letters as an attempt to drive a wedge between the president and the prime minister, one Kremlin source noted that “it’s obvious that such attempts will not go without corresponding reactions.”

According to Luzhkov’s latest letter, the president’s administration had already told the mayor on September 17 about the decision to fire him due to loss of confidence. Apparently, Luzhkov was asked to resign voluntarily the next day, but when it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, he was given an extra week to think it over. When Luzhkov returned to his office on Monday morning and announced that he wasn’t going anywhere, he already knew what was going to happen the next day.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has translated the text of the letter in full. Newtimes.ru, which hosts the original, has been suffering from bandwidth overload since the letter went online.

Prime Minister Putin said he agrees with Medvedev’s decision, and, as he is wont to do, stressed that it was made in strict accordance with the law. “It’s perfectly obvious that the relationship between the mayor of Moscow and the president didn’t work out, and anyway, the mayor is a subordinate of the president, not the other way around,” Putin said.

Several opposition activists were detained outside the mayor’s office on Tuesday evening, including one Other Russia member who attempted to unfurl a banner reading “Luzhkov, as you leave, break the fence.” The fence in question referred to the recently-erected barrier blocking off Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, where oppositionists gather on the 31st of each month to hold rallies in defense of free assembly as part of the Strategy 31 campaign. About 50 demonstrators were present outside the mayor’s office in total, including members of Solidarity, Yabloko, and the United Civil Front.

Here is a sampling of reactions from Russian analysts and oppositionists on Medvedev’s monumental decision:

Boris Nemtsov, Solidarity Co-Leader and Former Deputy Prime Minister

This morning, D. Medvedev, for the first time, performed a truly presidential deed. He fired Luzhkov as a result of a loss of confidence.

This is the first case where Dmitri Anatolevich has clearly acted independently.

The conflict between Medvedev and Luzhkov was advantageous for Putin, but the removal of a corrupt civil servant is extremely undesirable, as his system of power breaks down.

It’s the first time that there’s been a dismissal due to loss of confidence without having criminal suits filed or obvious city cataclysms.

If criminal suits for corruption don’t show up after this dismissal, then the dismissal is going to look unconvincing, and Luzhkov has a clear political future…

In short, in the run-up to 2011-2012, Luzhkov will offer up more than a few surprises.

So whether or not Dmitri Anatolevich likes it, criminal suits are going to have to be filed.

Otherwise we’re going to have yet another unexpected candidate for president.

Stanislav Belkovsky, Political Analyst

What should have happened has happened. Luzhkov is done with, although Yury Mikhailovich himself firmly believed that he was going to survive the latest try after seven previous unsuccessful attempts to remove him. For me, as a Muscovite voter, who the new mayor is going to be is totally unimportant. For me, it’s obvious that Luzhkov’s dismissal is not a political project, but an economic one. There are no politics here, because Luzhkov didn’t block Kremlin policy. He didn’t interfere in the process of determining a nominee for president in the 2012 elections, and a year and a half later would have supported any, or the only, candidate named by the Kremlin. The political character [of the dismissal] is very contrived.

The fact is that the federal financial-industrial groups decided to take Moscow for themselves, because they have long considered it unjust that these gigantic economic resources are being managed by a person from the past, who is organically disconnected from the contemporary federal elite. However, Vladimir Putin, who governed under the unofficial slogan “don’t make a splash,” that is to say don’t violate such hard-won socio-political stability – he was afraid to fire Luzhkov. And Dmitri Medvedev, as the famous Chinese proverb says it – “a newly born calf doesn’t fear a tiger,” the president, who doesn’t remember how it is when there’s instability, when there’s chaos, who is used to stability, came to this radical decision…

It’s possible that the new mayor, in the first months of his rule, will take a few relatively popular steps in order to win Muscovites’ trust… But the new mayor is not going to be interested in dismantling Luzhkov’s system. His task is to get control of this system and even strengthen it. Therefore, corruption in the city will remain and even grow.

Eduard Limonov, Other Russia Party Leader and Strategy 31 Co-Organizer

So they’ve gotten rid of the mayor!

Look out the window into the streets; can you see tanks? Luzhkov’s division hasn’t appeared?

I don’t think it’s going to appear…

I’ll see very soon whether or not the attitude of the Moscow courts toward the conflict on Triumfalnaya is going to change. On September 30, the Tverskoy Court is going to decide (for the second time) the fate of our suit (Alexeyeva, Kosyakin, Limonov) against the Moscow government concerning the rally on December 31, 2009.

On October 5, Justice Zaytsev will decide my personal fate as an organizer of the rally on August 31 of this year.

On October 6, the Moscow City Court will decide the fate of our suit (Alexeyeva, Kosyakin, Limonov) against the Moscow government regarding the July 31 rally.

So we’ll see.

Anton Orekh, Journalist, Ekho Moskvy Radio

This is what I want them to understand.

Moscow is a separate state. They say this about Moscow often, striving to underline how it gets fat at the expense of the rest of the country…

And few would find it simpler to govern Moscow than to govern the rest of Russia. And if the comrades from Leningrad think that this isn’t so, then they’re mistaken. And if they think that their friends from some kind of cooperative or their messmates from their school department can deal with the management of a separate country, they they’re also mistaken.

We shouldn’t be naive.

You’re not going to create freedom or democracy in Moscow by itself. There can’t be an honest capital in a larcenous country. If there’s no justice here, there won’t be any in Whitestone.

Whatever kind of mayor we get, he’s going to have to govern Moscow by the same rules that work in the entire rest of the territory of Russia, albeit Moscow and Russia are different countries.

The band members were ordered to appear at the headquarters of the Moscow City Police on Monday for an “interrogation,” said group soloist Maria Lyubicheva.

The phone call from the police headquarters informed the band that the electro-punk song “Gotov” (“Ready”), which was performed at the rally on Moscow’s Pushkin Square, can be interpreted as extremist.

Lyubicheva told the BBC that the offending lyrics – “to set fire to cop cars at night” and “the law is garbage” – have been taken out of context.

The chorus of the song, which was read without instrumental accompaniment at the rally, reads: I’m ready!/ And are you ready?/ To set fire to cop cars at night?/ It’s like a principle of life, a sign of good taste/ For those to whom the law is garbage.

“The song needs to be listened to in its entirety, because if you take lines out of context, then you can intentionally misconstrue any piece of work and call it extremist,” said Lyubicheva, who wrote the song’s lyrics.

According to the artist, the chorus speaks about the sacrifices that two people are prepared to make for the sake of their love.

Songs containing derogatory remarks about the Russian police cost popular rapper Noize MC a ten-day jail sentence in August.

The rapper, famous for his indictment of the Moscow police in his song “Mercedes S-666,” labeled some law enforcement officers “animals with red insignia” after they tried to stop him from handing a hat to attendees of one of his concerts in Volgograd in order to collect donations – a routine part of the artist’s program.

After the concert, Noize MC was detained for 48 hours and convicted the next day of minor hooliganism.

The rally in defense of the Khimki Forest on August 22 was sanctioned by the Moscow city authorities, a move that surprised organizers used to being denied permission to hold opposition events. At the same time, police refused to allow sound equipment to be set up on the stage.

The authorities argued that the use of sound equipment would turn the rally into a concert, which they did not grant permission to hold. However, as oppositionists noted, sound equipment is always used at their various other rallies.

In the end, a variety of musical groups, including Barto and headlined by rock singer Yury Shevchuk, performed acoustically with only the aid of megaphones.

Standing in front of the forest, the president explained the decision came as a result of the massive number of requests sent to him by everyone from the ruling United Russia Party to opposition parties and environmental groups.

Activists had hailed the decision earlier in the day by United Russia and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov to call on the president to halt the construction.

“I’m dumbfounded! This is tremendous!” was the initial reaction from Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the movement in defense of the forest. “I’m very glad that the party United Russia has heard the voice of the people. We appealed to all parties about this problem. I think that the decision by United Russia has to do with the fact that saw the amount of people who are outraged by the felling of the forest.”

As the BBC reports:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the suspension of controversial plans to build a new motorway through a forest outside Moscow.

Mr Medvedev said construction of the road from the capital to St Petersburg, via the Khimki forest, would be halted until a public hearing had been held.

The decision came after appeals from environmental groups and, surprisingly, the governing United Russia party.

On Sunday, some 2,000 people attended a concert to protest against the road.

Environmentalists say there several options for the route to bypass the forest, which they say is a unique ecosystem that is home to centuries-old oak trees and many species of wildlife.

In a message posted on his video blog on Thursday, Mr Medvedev said he had ordered the suspension because “our people, from the governing United Russia party to united opposition groups to circles of experts, are saying this demands more analysis”.

“Considering the number of appeals, I have taken the following decision: I order the government to halt the implementation of the orders to build the road in question and hold additional public and expert discussions.”

Earlier, the party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made an unprecedented appeal to the president to halt the project.

“United Russia has turned to the president of Russia… with the request to halt the construction of the highway through the Khimki forest,” chairman Boris Gryzlov said in a statement.

“We have different opinions within United Russia about this question. But the situation does not look simple.

“We think that it is necessary to carefully deal with the question and accordingly either change the route of the construction of the road or continue the work taking account of a deeper study of this question.”

The announcement was welcomed by the Union of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations.

“This is our victory,” spokesman Andrei Morgulyov told Associated Press news agency. “This decision would have never happened if we were not fighting for our cause.”

While city authorities had originally sanctioned the event, they then announced that there was no legal way to hold both a protest and a concert at the same time.

Regardless, Pushkin Square on Sunday was jam-packed with activists, environmentalists, and fans of the participating musicians.

As the Moscow Times reports:

While the three-hour rally ended peacefully, police earlier Sunday detained three prominent opposition activists who had planned to attend and blocked vans carrying the musical equipment of other musicians from the square.

Many demonstrators said they came to voice their opposition of both the deforestation in Khimki and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

“The Khimki forest is the occasion, but if oil prices drop, there will be more people to protest here,” said Vladimir Kondrashyov, a 41-year-old driver wearing a T-shirt reading, “Putin, step down.”

Despite the concert ban, Shevchuk, frontman for rock band DDT, sang his hits “Osen” (Fall) and “Rodina” (Motherland) on an acoustic guitar standing on an improvised stage on a truck, surrounded by scores of journalists, police and demonstrators, including Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest protest movement. Shevchuk made headlines in May when he criticized Putin in a televised exchange at a charity dinner in St. Petersburg.

Many more bands and singers, including Alexander F. Sklyar, Barto, Televizor and OtZvuki Mu, were expected to perform but could not enter the square. Cars with concert equipment were barred by the police from entering the site.

The police presence was massive and included city law enforcement officers, OMON riot police, and internal military forces. More than thirty police buses lined Tverskaya Ulitsa and the square itself was entirely cordoned off. According to the Moscow Times, more about 1,500 officers had been deployed for the event. Musicians were barred from bringing any audio equipment besides megaphones onto the square.

“This undermines the idea not only of a concert, but of a rally in general,” said Mikhail Kriger, one of the event’s organizers.

Another organizer, Nikolai Lyaskin, told Kasparov.ru that motorcyclists had attempted to attack the minibuses carrying audio equipment to the protest. The masked assailants, he said, rode up to the buses and began beating their wheels with iron bars. The buses managed to escape undamaged.

The Kremlin-founded and notoriously overzealous youth movement Nashi attempted to disrupt the protest-concert by bringing three buses to Pushkin Square and asking those gathered to come to the forest to collect garbage.

“In order to defend the forest you need work gloves, trash bags, and people, not songs, rallies, or incendiary speeches,” said Nashi Commissar Maria Kislitsyna. “Whoever really cares about the forest is going to go clean it up and whoever doesn’t will stay at the concert and listen to songs in its defense.”

While noble in theory (albeit ironic, since the forest that they’re cleaning will soon no longer exist), environmental activist and protest organizer Yaroslav Nikitenko explained that the Nashi event was nothing more than a provocation. “If they actually wanted to defend the Khimki Forest, they would have done this earlier,” he said. Moreover, that Nashi got involved at all indicates that the federal authorities are becoming anxious over the sizeable movement in defense of the forest, Nikitenko added.

On Saturday, the day before the protest-concert, the state-run news channel Vesti reported that it had actually already been held. While airing a report on Nashi’s garbage-collecting event, a Vesti commentator said that “in this way, the members of the youth organization expressed their attitude towards the concert in defense of the forest that was held on Pushkin Square.” Whether the channel corrected the remark was unclear.

Photos of the protest-concert are available at Gazeta.ru by clicking here.

The event is planned to be held on August 22 on Pushkin Square, and the mayor’s office had initially agreed to the event. However, a press release from the mayor’s office on Thursday stated that the organizers had only submitted the paperwork to hold a rally, not a concert.

Organizer Mikhail Shneyder was told by the city’s bureau for event management and safety that there’s no way to hold a rally and a concert at the same time. “You’re announcing all over the place that you’re holding a rally-concert, but that kind of format for an event does not exist. You will not be allowed to hold a concert and set up a covered stage,” Shneyder quoted the bureau as saying.

“I know that that kind of format doesn’t exist,” the organizer explained in response. “The law stipulates just a rally, but it’s for us to decide who is going to appear at our rally and how; if we want, we’ll call on a Buddhist and he’ll arrange 20 simultaneous chess matches.”

Regardless of any legal ambiguities, the organizers plan to go on with the show. Scheduled to be present are the groups DDT, OtZvuki My, Televizor, Padla Bear Outfit, and Barto. Journalist Artemy Troitsky agreed to host the event.

Yury Shevchuk, leader of DDT and an outspoken Kremlin critic, said the band had already purchased tickets to Moscow and was coming to the event for certain.

“Leap frog between the Moscow authorities – that’s a normal affair,” Shevchuk told Kasparov.ru. “We’re going to Moscow with an acoustic lineup and we’ll see there whether or not they’re going to let us play. That’s the kind of weather we have nowadays – either hot or cold.”

Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the movement to defend the Khimki Forest, insisted that the Moscow authorities had no legal right to ban their event. “I don’t know a single law that would ban setting up a stage for a rally. The authorities’ quibbles are entirely baseless,” she said.

“Let them not allow the people to hear Shevchuk and demonstrate to everyone that they are inflexible and unpopular politicians,” the activist went on. “We have been supported by musicians of the very highest caliber, and a smart civil servant wouldn’t think to bother us.”

The felling of the Khimki Forest began this past July. An expressway from Moscow to St. Petersburg is planned to take its place. Ecologists and activists have spoken out strongly against the project, insisting that it violates the law.