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.

Mikhail Fedotov, secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, was picked by the president on Tuesday to head the Presidential Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council, as well as to be the president’s human rights advisor.

Fedotov has spoken out on numerous occasions in defense of freedom of the press and many other rights issues, but alo worked as federal press minister prior to his job in the Union of Journalists – a possible cause of concern for some rights activists. At the same time, Fedotov was also a member of opposition leader Garry Kasparov’s Free Choice 2008 committee, which issued a critical declaration of then-President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of crippling democratic freedoms and turning Russia into an autocratic state.

While most Russian human rights activists were positively surprised by Fedotov’s appointments, some took a more critical approach.

“Fedotov isn’t just a rights activist, he’s also a former bureaucrat of the first order, with all the attributes,” Kirill Kabanov of the National Anti-corruption Committee told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “I don’t understand whether his appointment is a promotion for the council or something else.”

Organizers of the Strategy 31 campaign in defense of free assembly immediately appealed to the new rights advisor to help solve the ongoing conflict between opposition activists and the Moscow city government over Triumfalnaya Square. Rallies held on the square have been routinely denied government sanction and brutally cracked down on by city law enforcement. On August 16, 2010, the authorities announced that the square would be closed until 2012 pending the construction of a massive underground parking garage, and issued a blanket ban on public events. Some opposition leaders have been attempting to get Triumfalnaya Square status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thus preventing the construction, which they see as a ploy to prevent opposition protests.

In response, Fedotov promised to resolve the issue.

“I’ll try to do everything to ensure that this conflict disappears from the realm of public attention,” he told Interfax on Wednesday.

Fedotov said that conflicts do not exist to be stirred up, but to be settled. “How it’s going to be done, I’m not yet ready to say. I’m ready to use all possible means to get rid of this conflict. We need there to be less conflicts, not more,” he asserted.

However the issue is resolved, UNESCO is unlikely to play a role.

“As a former ambassador to UNESCO in Russia, I can say that the process of getting one site or another onto the UNESCO World Heritage List takes no less than five years,” Fedotov told Gazeta.ru. “Before getting onto that list, a site is first [put] onto a waiting list, and other procedures are carried out. We’re going to resolve the issue of Triumfalnaya Square much sooner.”

The Kremlin meeting with the council was the second this year, and participants discussed a variety of issues for more than three and a half hours in hopes of achieving concrete results.

In his opening remarks, President Medvedev noted that the law had been amended to reflect the discussion held during the first meeting on April 15 and that he was in favor of extending financial, material, and consultation support to non-profit organizations. He stressed, however, that much more needed to be done. “I am not a supporter of dramatizing anything,” Medvedev said.

Ella Pamfilova, head of the council, assured Medvedev that her group was ready to put forth effort to fight corruption but had strong reservations about the process. “There is one serious problem – who will realize this and how it will be realized,” she said.

Participants told Gazeta.ru that significant time was spent discussing problems of the effectiveness with the war on corruption. Complaints filed by citizens concerning the behavior of public servants are often answered by those same public servants, which Kirill Kabanov, Leader of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, insisted must be prohibited.

Kabanov said that the president was presented with detailed documentation of violations in law enforcement agencies, and that Medvedev understands very well that taking authority away from public servants would not be an easy task. Since many have become accustomed to cashing in on their positions of authority instead of fulfilling their actual duties, says Kabanov, the government must give “a signal to bureaucrats that we’re speaking seriously.”

Pamfilova addressed the scandalous death of 37-year old Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died on November 16 after being denied medical treatment in a Russian jail, where he had been held for a year without charge. “It’s a frightening tragedy when a 37-year old lawyer perishes and the perpetrators aren’t known, but only under investigation,” she said. Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, which has campaigned against numerous corrupt Russian politicians and bureaucrats, directly blamed the prison for the death. “He was their hostage and they killed their hostage by denying him medical attention,” he told the BBC.

The discussion between the president and the council did not include the fraudulent regional elections on October 11, which the president has admitted were flawed but refused to annul, saying that any issues should be resolved in court. He dismissed Pamfilova’s concern that Russians have a very skeptical view of their judicial system, and that recommendations to resolve controversial problems in the court were largely seen as mockery. “What can be an alternative to an appeal to the court?” Medvedev asked in response. “Either lynching, which we, as you understand, have undertaken at more than once point in the history of our government at various times, or an appeal to the party committee. And both of those are located far from the main path of the development of civilization.”

The presidential council is set to meet again in spring 2010, which Pamfilova has proposed be dedicated to a discussion of the volatile situation in the North Caucuses.

President Medvedev has stated on numerous occasions that the war on corruption was a high priority for his administration. A number of recent scandals, however, have garnered skim responses from the Kremlin. An internal memo was obtained on November 16 by activists that indicted police chiefs of conspiring to illegally disrupt a series of lawful protests. A police officer in Novorossiysk came forward earlier in the month with 150 hours of audio backing up claims he first posted on YouTube detailing corruption in law enforcement agencies. Blatant fraud in the October regional elections has been statistically documented, but was at once acknowledged and dismissed by the president.