[Summary translation prepared by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

"Pollution will reach all rivers to the north", 19 January 2021

Residents of the Ural village of Baranchinsky stood up against the industrial giant UMMC and officials.
Baranchinsky is a large village 178 kilometres from Ekaterinburg. There are several hundred private houses and two dozen five-storey buildings. The population is 9,000 people. Last October, local residents sounded the alarm: 1.47 kilometres from their homes and 197 metres from a garden community of 600 household plots, the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (UMMC), Iskandar Makhmudov's industrial giant with a net profit of 5-13 billion roubles a year, planned to build a copper-iron-vanadium ore processing plant...

According to Evgeny [a local resident], since the forest will be cut down because of the quarry development and construction of the processing plant, and the cutting itself will pass through the settlements of Baranchinsky, Orulikha, and Laya, animals and birds will lose their usual habitat...

"Due to the proximity of the plant from Baranchinsky settlement, all the effluents from the enterprise will go into the Laya River, and it flows into the Tagil River. Further, all the rivers up to the north will be polluted... (Tobol and Irtysh). This will lead to an ecological catastrophe," Baranchinsky residents wrote...

Experts also have questions about the mining and processing plant project.
“The water circulation and treatment plant project has not been submitted for public discussion,” says Igor Shkradyuk, coordinator of the industrial greening program at the Center for Wildlife Conservation. “We do not have any information about the treatment facilities at the second stage of the mine and we want to see the Svyatogor treatment facilities and take water samples before approving them. In addition, it is not known what will happen if the sludge storage dam washes out and the pulp flows into the Laya or Borovka river? What is the hazard class of this pulp? What is the prognosis for the accumulation of heavy metal salts in the pulp over the years?

According to Shkradyuk, the list of missing volumes of design documentation for the enrichment plant “takes up one and a half pages.” Despite this and the lack of official results of public hearings, stripping work in the forests near Baranchinsky is already underway.