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.”

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.