In our premiere episode, we meet 17-year-old Rita Naumenko, one of just a handful of Fridays for Future activists in Russia. Rita’s protests target her government and the large corporations that seem to show no interest in curbing harmful emissions. Restrictive laws and a climate of repression present activists like Rita with nearly insurmountable challenges, but she persists.
Defenders of the Earth captures the gripping and inspiring stories of activists around the world who are taking on powerful interests to protect our planet. Our presenter is Vanessa Nakate, climate justice activist from Uganda. Our episodes profile activists in Russia, Liberia, Honduras, and the Philippines. In this episode, we meet 17-year-old Rita Naumenko, one of just a handful of Fridays for Future activists in Russia.
As climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben wrote in Last Line of Defence, a report from Global Witness released in September 2021, land and environmental defenders ”are at risk, in the end, not just because of another local person who pulls the trigger or plunges the blade; they’re at risk because they find themselves living on or near something that some corporation is demanding.”
In 2020, 227 activists were murdered for taking a stand to defend human rights, their land, and our environment. Over a third of the attacks were reportedly linked to resource exploitation — logging, mining, and large-scale agribusiness — and hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure. And that number is likely to be higher due to poor reporting.
Defenders of the Earth is produced by Global Witness and Whistledown Productions. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Vanessa Nakate: Our planet is in crisis, but everywhere you look you'll find people who believe it's worth saving, standing up against threats, against violence, and against climate breakdown.
Rita Naumenko: It makes me anxious because sometimes I feel lonely because there are not so many activists here and not so many people care about this problem. Sometimes it feels like we cannot change anything within the system, but when I see the protests around the world it reminds me that there are also people who care about this issue in the other parts of the world.
Vanessa Nakate: 17 year old Rita Naumenko is one of just a handful of Fridays for Future activists in Russia. The Fridays for Future movement emerged after Swedish, then-ninth-grader Greta Thunberg held a climate strike outside parliament in Stockholm on August 20th, 2018 instead of going to school. Greta's action spawned a global movement, one I am proud to be a member of. In most countries, such demos are seen as part of an individual's democratic rights, but for Rita and other Russian activists, standing up to the government is considerably more challenging and dangerous.
This is Defenders of the Earth. I am Vanessa Nakate, and in this episode we are looking at the work of Rita Naumenko and other activists fighting for the environment in Russia.
Rita Naumenko: I would say that as I see it, the main goal of our movement here in Russia is to make the government aware of the climate change because they're not taking actively actions to prevent its consequences.
Vanessa Nakate: Rita's protests target her government and the large corporations showing no interest in [inaudible 00:02:37] harmful emissions, but she also has a passionate mission to inform other young adults about the devastating effects of climate change.
Rita Naumenko: So I really want to transform our education and to make people know about the climate change from their childhoods, and not only about the climate change. Also about other environmental problems that are related to the climate change. So in Russia, no one really talk about the climate change and you're not taught about the climate change at school. My family also is not that environmentally involved, so they haven't talked to me about environmental issues. And in Russia, there is not that much reliable information and reliable sources. I know that many people learn about the climate change from Fridays for Future movements and from Greta.
Greta Thunberg: This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?
Vanessa Nakate: Greta Thunberg is now a global figure as a result of her speeches and protests. For Rita, it was one speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York that really opened her eyes to the power of protest, regardless of the protestors' age.
Rita Naumenko: She was not discussed when I started to be interested in this topic, so I only heard about her once on my French class. It was not from our local media, but it was for my language class. I heard her speech in the European parliament. That's how I got involved in the climate activism.
Vanessa Nakate: Rita is not alone. Greta has inspired young people from all over the world to protest.
Speaker 4: From Ottawa to London, DC, and San Francisco, students worldwide skipped a class Friday for the youth climate strike.
Protestors: Climate change is not a lie! We won't let our planet die!
Speaker 6: Students skipping school to protest for climate action in various countries, mostly European. This has been going on for months.
Protestors: Hey, hey, ho, ho! Climate change has got to go!
Vanessa Nakate: But in Russia, the movement had to find different ways to protest. Simply walking out of school and marching down the street wasn't an option.
Rita Naumenko: The political landscape is a bit challenging for all activists here, not only for climate activists. And it's really difficult to organize protests and mass gatherings now, as well as go to the single picket because there are a lot of limitations and you cannot hold a mass protest in a really public place. You can only organize it's somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I would say. Because the system is that to organize mass gathering, you need to notify the administration of the CD, and you need to fill in the form with one to two of people who are going to attend the event with a place, with names of the organizers of this event, and they either decline or approve, but change the place where the protest will take place. And they usually change it for something like Hyde Park, so it's not really in the center of Moscow. And also I could say that it's a bit challenging to do activism because of the foreign agent laws. You can be deemed foreign agent even if you're just a citizen, and it's really, I wouldn't say it's scary, but it's also a thing that you should consider when you decide to do activism.
Vanessa Nakate: Despite being head of the fourth largest emitter in the world, President Putin made his government's attitude to the global climate youth movement very clear in a response to Greta's speech at the UN.
President Putin: I may disappoint you, but I don't share everyone's enthusiasm about Greta Thunberg's speech. The fact that young people, teenagers, pay attention to the acute problems of the modern world, including ecology, that is right and very good. We need to support them. But when somebody uses children and teenagers in their own interest, it deserves only to be condemned.
Rita Naumenko: The fact that Russia is emitting so much greenhouse gases and the government does nothing is more scary than the fact that we are oppressed, because the fact that we are oppressed is more... It makes me hopeless.
Vanessa Nakate: That oppression is built into the system. It's a process Bill Browder knows a lot about.
Bill Browder: Vladimir Putin has a very large country to govern. He has 11 times zones, 145 million people, the largest land mass in the world, and he also has a terrible bureaucracy that doesn't work.
Vanessa Nakate: Bill was the CEO of the largest foreign investment fund in Russia until 2005 when he was denied entry to the country and declared a threat to national security as a result of his battle against corporate corruption. Today, he is a campaigner on human rights and an expert on systematic oppression in Russia.
Bill Browder: The main way that he manages is through dramatic symbolism. And so what he wants to do is to create really high profile examples of people doing things that he doesn't want done, and then punishing them in a way that everybody will take notice and believe that that could happen to them. For example, when he wanted to win his war with the oligarch, he arrested the richest oligarch in the country, put him on trial, and allowed the television cameras to film him sitting in a cage. When Sergei Skripal, an FSB agent, defected to the West he wanted to poison him with the most horrific chemical weapon, Novichok, so that everybody else who was thinking about defecting from the FSB wouldn't defect. Then, so the key to Putin's actions is to pick somebody who is very noticeable, do something terrible to them, and then send a message to everybody else in that category of people that the same thing can happen to you.
Vanessa Nakate: Following Bill's expulsion from Russia, the authorities raided his offices, seized his investment companies, and used them to take $230 million of taxes that the companies had already paid. When Browder's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, investigated the crime, he was arrested and tortured for 358 days and killed in custody at the age of 37 in November 2009.
Speaker 9: Sergei Magnitsky was accused of tax evasion a year ago and was awaiting trial when he died earlier this [crosstalk 00:11:10]-
Speaker 10: A trial without a defendant. The deceased Sergei Magnitsky exposed a $230 million tax fraud, but ended up the accused. In pretrial detention, the lawyer complained of a lack of medical treatment. It was there that he died allegedly after a beating in 2009.
Vanessa Nakate: Since then, Browder has spent his time fighting for justice for his friend and colleague. His campaigning led to the US Congress adopting the Magnitsky Act, which imposed visa sanctions and asset freezes on those involved in the detention, ill treatment, and death of Sergei Magnitsky, as well as in other human rights abuses. The threat overshadows everything that Rita Naumenko and other young Russian activists do. And although her young age offers her a little protection from the state, it by no means guarantees her safety.
Rita Naumenko: I would say the age limitations are disturbing. I can call this oppression because I think it's okay to allow a minor, to go on a strike and to share their position, their opinion, but there is no opportunity to do this here. If you go to the strike and you are considered an organizer, you probably cannot be a minor because you can be an organizer only if you're over 18. But if you consider yourself participant, there are no age limitations. So the status of a person who is striking is not defined. That's why you don't really know how it will go. But in most cases I think if a minor is striking, then there is a high possibility of being detained. I would say a lot of people are scared because they know that going to the single picket or even to the mass protest can affect their career, their studies at the university, and their life in general. That's why they just stay neutral and they're not involved in activism.
Vanessa Nakate: But even in the face of this systematic oppression, many are speaking out. One of those is Alexander Savelyev, a journalist, blogger, and human rights defender from Krasnodar in Southern Russia.
Alexander Savel...: I got interested in activism at some point in 2010. Certain events were happening, including protests in Russia that got triggered by the rigged elections in 2011 and 2012. This made analyze what was happening and think about activism even more. Soon after, I discovered an organization called EWNC, and that's who I started to work with.
Vanessa Nakate: Alexander is a leading member of the EWNC, or Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus. It's a nonprofit organization that works to protect the environment of the Caucasus region, a vast stretch of land spanning Europe and Asia. It encompasses the Black and Caspian Seas and parts of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Southern Russia. The group has been labeled by the Russian government as an undesirable organization. Under Russian law, its members now face fines and potential prison sentences for being a threat to the security of the state.
Alexander Savel...: There are people that read the propaganda and think that the EWNC are a foreign agent. These are crazy ideas that are being distributed by the pro-governmental media structures and organizations, but [inaudible 00:15:34] officials themselves, as in one case where we were protesting against the arrest of highway. Here, the locals would tell us that they were being pressured by people from the local administrative office who were demanding that they take our banners down from their balconies. The officials state they knew they were being paid $200 by EWNC to protest. They struck them as there was no money involved at all, but when the locals come across such stupid claims which they know are not true, it forces them to think critically in the future.
Vanessa Nakate: EWNC activists have been subjected to harassment, physical attacks, constant threats, raids and searches on their offices and homes, and even detention. In 2011, two EWNC activists, Suren Gazaryan and Evgeny Vitishko, were arrested for graffiting a face in Krasnodar to protest against an illegal land grab by the then minister of agriculture.
Alexander Savel...: That was one of the most sinister [inaudible 00:16:49], and I had just joined EWNC. Suren Gazaryan had to leave the country, as there was a chance that his conditional sentence would be replaced by a real one. He lives in Germany now. However, Evgeny Vitishko stayed, and one day as he went to the bureau for one of his conditional sentence check-ins, he was arrested for something else. He was given 15 days in prison for profanity, for swearing at a bus stop. He wasn't even at a bus stop that day. He came in his own car. However, while he was there for those 15 days, he faced a trial and was sent off to a prison facility in Tambor. He was there for nearly a year and nine months.
Vanessa Nakate: In 2019, Alexander himself disappeared for a short while as he was arrested following yet another harrowing raid.
Alexander Savel...: We've always faced pressure, and there have been several raids over the past year. Of course, none of them are technically linked to what [inaudible 00:17:49] is doing. They opened a criminal case against me because I was in charge of MBK Media, and they saw that this corporation is an undesirable organization and fined me twice for sharing something on Facebook. They rang the doorbell, broke into the gate with an angle grinder, and eventually got inside. They knocked my colleague down, spraying him with pepper spray. I was on the first floor at the time, and I could feel my own eyes starting to itch. The 10 police officers dressed in balaclavas took him outside, and at this point I began to tell them that we had to leave too because we couldn't stay there for our own health. Eventually, they did let us out. And that is when I found out that [inaudible 00:18:35] of investigation was opened regarding me, and they took me to the station to be interrogated. Today, the case is closed because of a lack of any evidence of any crime. However, they did take all our hard drives, and we all understand very well that neither my journalism nor MBK Media are the main reason for why they came to us that day.
Vanessa Nakate: This tactic is nothing new. Bill Browder has been witnessing this behavior since Vladimir Putin came to power.
Bill Browder: In Russia, anybody who speaks out against the government or speaks out against kleptocracy or anything else really puts themselves in a very precarious position. If your speeches are meaningless, if nobody notices them, then nothing will happen. But if they have any impact whatsoever, then the authorities will look for ways of shutting you down. And that could be from kicking you out of school if you're young, to having you fired from your job if you're older. And if your voice is particularly powerful, it could mean having you arrested, or if you're really powerful, it could mean having you killed. So if you want to be a protestor, you should hope that you're really a bad protestor so nobody notices you, because if you're a good protestor and they do notice you, bad things are going to happen to you.
Vanessa Nakate: People like Rita are still taking to the streets to highlight the devastating effects climate change is having on the planet. But the pandemic has severely restricted their efforts at peaceful protest.
Rita Naumenko: So the FF movement in Russia started in spring 2019, and we were doing a lot of project related to the climate education. We were organizing protests. We were doing single strikes. We were talking to the scientists, to the politicians, so everything was fine. But then the pandemic started and all the things went online and a lot of people left the movement. And now I can see that we're trying to be everything from the beginning, because before the pandemic, there were a lot of local groups in different Russian cities. These groups were small, but still they existed. And they also were doing some initiatives in their local cities, in their local spots, but after the pandemics it disappeared. So, yeah, the pandemic has greatly affected our movement.
Vanessa Nakate: But looking ahead, what advice does Bill Browder have for others wanting to make a difference in Russia?
Bill Browder: I often get approached by young teenagers from Russia who are living abroad, and they always ask me, "I really want to make Russia a better place. Should I go back there?" And I tell them that they're really in a bad position. Because if they go back to Russia, they have two choices. They can either join the system and become criminals, but criminals by Western standards, or they can protest the system and stand up to it, and then they become criminals in Russia. But either way, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. So I advise those who have the luxury of not going back, to develop themselves outside of the country so that maybe one day when it is an honest country, then go back. It's really a hard thing to tell any young person to put themselves in harm's way if they're already living in Russia. And at the same time, it's hard to tell people to keep their mouths shut in a dictatorship where it's going in the wrong direction. So there's no good answers to that question.
I'm extremely pessimistic about the future of Russia as long as Vladimir Putin remains the president of the country. His intention is to be president until his natural life ends. And as long as he's president, the system of corruption, of malfeasance, of state-sanctioned murder, of repression will carry on and get worse. The more tenuous his hold on power is, the more extreme the repressions will become. And so it's hard to have any good feelings about what's going to happen while he's in power.
Vanessa Nakate: For her part, Rita remains convinced that she can make a difference. In fact, given the enormity of the threat posed by climate change, she's more determined than ever to make her voice heard.
Rita Naumenko: I'm not sure what I want to do in the future. I definitely know that it will be related to the climate change, but I didn't know how because now I consider different paths I can follow. I think I can be a scientist and maybe to research in this field or do something related to environmental policy because that's also what interests me a lot.
Vanessa Nakate: This has been Defenders of the Earth. It is a Whistledown and Global Witness production.