When I saw these hellish carved gates, I thought it was a still from *Waterworld* or *Mad Max*. You know, something about half-wild people from a post-apocalyptic age who are obsessed with fences, stakes, and watchtowers from which they can fire flaming arrows.
That’s exactly why I love our Access to Water project: it keeps turning up things like this.
So do you know what this is?
It’s Putin associate Boris Rotenberg blocking off the bay’s waters so that only his own boats can enter.
He literally put a door across the bay and locked it. And there’s a guard tower above it.
What’s more, at the request of this “respected person,” a land plot was created for him directly on the bay’s waters (which is explicitly prohibited by Clause 2, Article 102 of the Land Code) and registered as his private property.
This is in Leningrad Region, in the settlement of Toksovo—an incredibly beautiful area. The boundaries of plot No. 47:07:0502059:70 run through the waters of Uimakhuoneenlahti Bay on Lake Khepoyarvi.
Here is a link to the Google map.
The law explicitly prohibits the privatization of lakes and bays, as well as the shoreline strip of public water bodies (which extends 20 meters / about 66 feet):
Under Article 8 of the Water Code, lakes and bays are federally owned by operation of law.
So even though it’s Rotenberg, the Leningrad Region State Environmental Oversight Committee reviewed ACF’s complaint submitted as part of the project and confirmed that a violation had occurred:
Now old man Rotenberg is being held administratively liable for illegally blocking the shoreline, and we will push both for a court claim to return the land plot to federal ownership and for the demolition of the illegal structures.
Certificates claiming ownership of a river or shoreline are exactly what Mayor Sobyanin once called “crooked little pieces of paper”—documents with no legal force whatsoever.
All the sites we are currently tracking are collected here: https://fbk.info/voda/
If you know of a good case, write to us.
And don’t forget to set up a small (but regular) donation to ACF. Rotenberg isn’t going to sue himself.