The prime minister arrived in the Black Sea city of Sochi on Wednesday to check on preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics. As part of his visit, Putin inspected housing being built for the evicted Imeretinskaya residents – approximately one thousand families coming from 628 houses and 369 apartments.

The residents have been protesting the unfair conditions of their eviction for years, holding demonstrations, hunger strikes, and filing suits with the European Court of Human Rights. The complaints range from the unlawful basis of the evictions to unfair compensation for their confiscated property.

At the same time, Prime Minister Putin has assured officials from the International Olympic Committee that the evicted residents are content with their new housing.

“The people are satisfied. I have to speak honestly: many of these people didn’t live in these conditions earlier,” said the prime minister. The new housing plans by Olympstroy, the state corporation responsible for Olympic construction, provide for 526 houses and several apartment buildings.

The evicted Imeretinskaya Valley residents were given the choice to take either the new housing or monetary compensation equal to the value of their property. If the new housing is worth less than a family’s previous property, then it is also entitled to additional compensation.

However, many residents say that the Olympstroy housing – located in mountainous villages near airport radars – is simply unacceptable compared to their own, high-quality homes closer to the sea. Moreover, many say that the monetary compensation they’re receiving is far below the actual market value they should be getting.

Despite these ongoing issues, the Russian authorities have told Olympic officials that the problems surrounding the eviction of the Imeretinskaya residents have already been resolved.

Construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi includes plans for 13 new or reconstructed sports facilities, 4 ski resorts with tracks more than 150 kilometers in length, 8 kilometers of ski lifts, and more than 100 hotels with 27,000 rooms.

The Russian authorities have been severely criticized by not only evicted residents, but by ecologists, geologists, human rights organizations, oppositionists, and numerous other experts for a host of problems ranging from unprecedented damage to Sochi’s unique natural environment to rights abuses against construction workers. Ecologists note with particular concern that parts of the Caucasian State Nature Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has already undergone irreparable damage.

Alik Le, head of a union of local residents, said that five of the ten original hunger strikers are currently continuing the protest that they began on May 19.

While local law enforcement representatives and doctors are present on the scene, no local or federal media has even remotely touched on the story, Le said.

“The regional media is blocking all information about us. Nobody in Russia knows what’s going on. Foreign journalists have come to us, called, are supportive,” he said.

About 700 families in the Imeretinskaya Valley are affected by the evictions, which residents say violate their constitutional rights and lay waste to generations of labor and cultivation. Meanwhile, the construction of six ice facilities for the games is already underway.

The continued hunger strike looks set to collide with the Official International Olympic Committee Debriefing in Sochi that begins on Sunday, where organizers of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will discuss with future organizers what lessons they learned from holding the games. Whether the media blockade will hold up with the influx of foreign journalists remains to be seen.

Criticism of Olympic preparations in Sochi has come not only from human rights groups, but from ecologists and geologists who warn that mismanagement by the Russian state-owned corporation in charge of the games, Olympstroy, has already caused irreparable environmental damage and could easily lead to much greater catastrophes.

Information about the consequences of the ongoing construction in Sochi has been virtually absent from the Russian media, leading many of its victims to take drastic measures to make their stories known. The Imeretinskaya Valley residents’ hunger strike is at least the third protest of its kind to have been held since the beginning of the year; the other two involved construction workers forced to work months without pay. In April, the BBC reported that a senior scientist critical of how Olympstroy was failing to conduct proper geological surveying had fled the country out of fear of persecution.

Speaking to the BBC, Volkov said that construction of major Olympic facilities in Sochi is being done “too hastily, without a proper system for the engineering research that would be appropriate for these environmental dangers.”

Numerous ecologists have been voicing concerns for years already that Olympic construction in Sochi will lead to irreparable damage of one of the world’s most unique biospheres. In February, the Russian bureau of the World Wildlife Foundation issued a scathing press release slamming Olympstroy’s failure to heed objections and warnings made by their ecologists, and decrying preparations for the games as “out of control.” Meanwhile, residents have complained of forced evictions to make way for new facilities, and some unpaid workers have staged hunger strikes to draw attention to their plight.

But as a geologist, Dr. Volkov is primarily concerned about plans for a combination road and railway that will link the coastal center of the city of Sochi with the mountains in Krasnaya Polyana, where most of the Olympic events are planned to take place. When then-President Vladimir Putin won the bid in 2007 to hold the games in Sochi, only a very rudimentary roadway connected these two areas. With its $8 billion price tag, the new one is the most expensive Olympic project of all, and Volkov argues that its construction could lead to a series of geological disasters.

“It’s a potentially dangerous area,” said the geologist, writing an open letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev from his hiding place in Ukraine. “There have been big landslides in the past and there are large deposits of mercury, uranium and other potentially dangerous minerals. But all scientific advice is being ignored.”

Dr. Volkov also says that he has repeatedly appealed to regional authorities in the Southern Federal District as well as Olympstroy management, but to no avail.

Speaking to the BBC – which notably happened upon an active landslide in the Krasnaya Polyana mountains during its research on this report – Krasnaya Polyana Mayor Sergei Avdeev said that he shared Dr. Volkov’s concerns. “When the International Olympic Committee awarded the games to Russia, they knew full well that Russia did not have enough time to do proper research and build all the facilities in line with international environmental and construction standards,” he said. “I pray to God that there will not be any consequences. The only thing we can do is pray and hope.”

A video report on Dr. Volkov by the BBC can be found by clicking here, and a photo gallery by clicking here.

The workers in question were brought in from all over Russia, including parts of Siberia, to building cottages for residents now being evicted from their homes to make way for new Olympic construction in Sochi’s picturesque Imeretinskaya Valley. The contractors and subcontractors who hired them have received millions of rubles from the government since December 2009, but have not paid their workers in more than three months.

The general contractor for the cottage project, Mosconversprom, said that the delays in paying the workers were largely a result of “dragged-out transfers of documents to subcontractors.” They also placed blame on Olympstroy, Russia’s state-owned corporation tasked with managing construction for the Olympics, for not sending Mosconversprom its allocated funding.

The contractors said on Monday that they were able to convince some of the workers to end their hunger strike, promising to pay them on March 24. Others continued their protest, which has now been ongoing since March 11.

Russia’s plans for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi have been controversial since then-President Vladimir Putin made the bid in 2007, but they have been pushed into the spotlight in the wake of Russia’s poor performance in the Vancouver Olympic Games. Critics have questioned the viability of holding the Olympics in Sochi, given its status of a small resort city that largely lacks the infrastructure needed for the games. Residents of hundreds of buildings in the Imeretinskaya Valley region have been protesting their eviction and the destruction of their homes, some of which have seen seven generations of the same families, for years now. The World Wildlife Foundation recently withdrew its support from the games because of ongoing environmental damage being caused to Sochi’s unique natural environment, with UNESCO and Greenpeace also vocal with similar criticisms.

In a scathing press release published on their website on Wednesday, the ecologists announced that preparation for the Olympics “has gone out of control, the quality of construction is poor, and great damage to the surrounding environment has already been caused and is going to continue.” Since building contractors have ignored all of the ecologists’ objections, says the announcement, the WWF is putting a halt to cooperation with Olympstroy, the state-owned corporation primarily responsible for construction of Olympic facilities in Sochi.

Representatives at Olympstroy called the announcement a complete surprise, arguing that they have always made an effort to take statements from the WWF into account.

Igor Chestin, head of the Russian bureau of the WWF, disagrees. “We intentionally picked the beginning of the Olympics in Vancouver to tell the world how things are going with observing ecological norms during facility construction in Sochi,” he said. Despite creating a working group and coordination council to bring together ecologists and representatives from Olympstroy and other contracted organizations, and despite the contractors’ approval of all of the ecologists’ proposals for facility construction, there have never been any tangible results.

“The proposals are documented and formalized, but then everything they do goes to the contrary,” Chestin said in outrage. “Last September, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak assured us that the construction would not touch the Caucasian Biosphere Reserve. And now Rosregistr has changed its borders, and Gazprom is building a road to its resort there,” referring to Russia’s massive natural gas corporation.

According to ecologists’ estimates, the cost of the ecological impact of roads and railways being constructed in Sochi is 240 billion rubles, about $8 billion. However, the figure “is based on zoological and biological research conducted by less than ten people in only a couple of weeks.” As a result, unique trees were chopped down and no compensational measures were taken to decrease the impact on the surrounding environment, ecologists say. Additionally, the condition of the surrounding environment is still unmonitored, despite the fact that construction began in 2008. Several prominent parks and reserves have meanwhile suffered a significant decrease in size, including Sochi National Park and the Utrish nature reserve. Plans to build a nature park in Imeretinskaya Valley, which would have compensated for some of the damage caused by the construction, have fallen through.

Even measures that have theoretically been taken to compensate for environmental damage came under criticism in the WWF statement. “A striking example is the planting of box trees to compensate for the virgin forest chopped down during roads and railways construction,” says the WWF. “There was an announcement that seedlings would be brought in from a cultivation facility, but there is a great deal of evidence that they were simply pulled up from the natural forest. This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that no cultivation facility for box trees exists in Russia.”

Chestin said that as a result, the WWF was halting their partnership with Olympstroy and would meanwhile investigate the possibility of withdrawing their support for the Sochi Olympics altogether. “Russian organizations cannot influence anything, and therefore we are going to UNESCO and will wait for a commission from there in the spring,” he said in conclusion.