MoJ repeatedly declares Kuban ecological NCO foreign agent

The non-commercial organization (NCO) "Civil Initiative against Environmental Crime"* has been added to the register of foreign agents, the Russian Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has informed. The NCO has been labelled as such for the second time, but this time, unlike the 2019 case, the decision-making procedure was completely opaque, the NCO has stated.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on December 13, 2019, the Goryachy Klyuch City Court fined the above NCO, after it was checked by the Russian MoJ. On January 9, 2022, Dmitry Shevchenko, the head of the NCO, reported that the MoJ had checked the NCO, found no foreign funding, and excluded it from the register of foreign agents.

The check showed that in 2018-2019, financial receipts and a car were received by the NCO "Civil Initiative against Environmental Crime"* from the Greenpeace. The MoJ has concluded that the NCO had violated the law by failing to apply for inclusion into the register of NCOs-foreign agents. According to Dmitry Shevchenko, the NCO's fire-fighting activities "are greatly irritating authorities and officials who dislike the public monitoring."

The NCO has been labelled as a foreign agent for the second time in its six-year-long history, says the NCO's community in the "VKontakte" social network.

"In 2019, we were punished for fighting landscape fires and supporting volunteer fire-fighters; and in 2024, it's absolutely unclear for what and under whose 'foreign influence,' according to the MoJ's bureaucrats, we've found ourselves in the register ... They need no checks and no public procedure at all – you are simply entered into some register and that's it," the NCO's message has stated.

*Included by the Russian Ministry of Justice (MoJ) into the register of foreign agents.