Jailed Russian Critic of Sochi Olympics Now on Hunger Strike By ANDREW ROTHFEB. 17, 2014
Launch media viewer Yevgeny Vitishko was given a sentence of three years in a penal colony for defacing a fence surrounding a vacation house that he claimed belonged to the region’s governor and was built illegally in a national park. Mikhail Mordasov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images SOCHI, Russia — An environmental activist critical of the Olympic Games who was sentenced to three years in prison last week has gone on a hunger strike, members of a public oversight committee who met with him in jail said Monday.
Yevgeny Vitishko, a member of the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus, a regional environmental activism group, has refused food since Feb. 11, calling his sentence politically motivated, Anna Mitrenko, a member of the oversight committee, confirmed.
“It is a step of desperation,” Vladimir V. Kimayev, the head of the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus, said in a telephone interview. “This man has been put in a hopeless situation. He has been sentenced for no reason.”
Mr. Vitishko was given
a sentence of three years in a penal colony for defacing a fence surrounding a vacation house that he claimed belonged to the region’s governor and was built illegally in a national park.
While he was given a suspended sentence, similar to parole here, in 2012, an appeals court invoked the tougher sentence on Wednesday, saying that Mr. Vitishko planned to violate a travel ban by coming to the Olympic Games.
Mr. Vitishko’s case has been a rare moment of conflict during an Olympics where Russia has sought to play down internal criticism over a number of delicate issues including the cost of the Games, a recent law banning “homosexual propaganda” among minors, and a blizzard of construction that has transformed the cityscape of Sochi and the ecology of the region surrounding it.
In the city on Monday, a protester holding a sign that read “freedom to Evgeny Vitishko” with a drawing of the Olympic rings was arrested during a one-man demonstration in front of the mayor’s office. He was sentenced to 30 hours of community service for violating protest laws, his lawyer announced. Late Sunday night, gay rights activists said that a transgender former Italian lawmaker, Vladimir Luxuria, had been detained during a protest against the “homosexual propaganda” law.
Otherwise,
a park that has been set aside for protests and is miles from the competitions, has remained quiet, with few applications submitted and at least one denied because it was delivered late.
Speaking with journalists on Monday, Anatoly N. Pakhomov, the mayor of Sochi, declined to comment on Mr. Vitishko and Ms. Luxuria’s cases, but did trumpet recent meetings between members of Mr. Vitishko’s group and the regional and federal administration, including the deputy minister of the environment.
The environmental group canceled a protest set for Sunday in the designated park in favor of the meetings with the government, a concession that Mr. Kimayev said “the administration has not given us in seven years.”
Even in Moscow, the police have worked hard to make sure that even if there are protests, then they should not mention Sochi or the Olympics.
At a joint demonstration with members of gay rights and socialist groups in Moscow, the police asked protesters to remove a banner that referred to the “Hunger Games Sochi 2014,” or else they would be arrested.
“They said our demonstration was sanctioned against ‘repression’ and ‘corruption,’ and said that Sochi is not repression or corruption,” said Denis Razumovksy, a member of the Rainbow Association, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights group.
The protesters rolled up the banner and ended the demonstration early.
Patrick Reevell contributed reporting from Moscow.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/europe/jailed-russian-critic-of-sochi-olympics-now-on-hunger-strike.html?_r=0 
