According to the authors of the video — Evgeny Pashutkin, Igor Rogov, and Carolina Kanaeva — Mordovian authorities remain inactive and silent about two important environmental problems.
First comes the absence of sewage treatment plants and pits, where waste from city sewers is drained. These pits are 200 metres from the Insar river, which flows through Saransk. They are not strengthened with asphalt concrete, drains rot and poison the soil and groundwater. The authorities promised to have built treatment facilities by April 2017, but did not do that. According to Pashutkin, after the authorities "started to fuss" and to fill the pits with reagents, bad smell became weaker, but the problem remained.
The second problem is a burning dump in the village of Romodanovo (30 kilometers from Saransk):
— The dump in Romodanovo is like a little hell on earth. There are thousands of fires. As soon as the wind starts blowing towards Saransk, people smell the sewage and burning landfill and gasp.
Environmental issues, according to activists, are the exact reason why bees and all the fish in Pushkinsky pond died and the crabs crawled ashore in Saransk in the beginning of June:
— Fish just floated up — we do not know, what had poisoned it. I’m receiving messages that in other regions bees died in large quantities, too, — Pashutkin said.
The activists have recorded the video message to Finns partly in Finnish, because the peoples of Mordovia and Finland have common history.
«Mordovia is home to the Finno-Ugric peoples. You are our brothers and sisters, so we ask for help in spreading this information outside Russia among related peoples from Finland» — said the authors of the video.
The activists adressed Finns because they have more advanced "green technology". In Russia, the development of "green technologies" and "development of energy-saving technologies" in other countries are assigned in the Economic security strategy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030 as one of the threats to the economic security of the country.
The activists believe that they acted on behalf of the concerned public of Mordovia — in the video they collected complaints of vk.com users and community "Saransk. Wall of Shame". According to Evgeny Pashutkin, the post with the video was reposted by more than 100 people in two hours, it was watched on YouTube by about a thousand people.
In May, activists of "Open Russia" held an action and collected more than five hundred signatures of inhabitants for cleaning tap water from a rust.
Several villages of Mordovia belong to the settlements located within the boundaries of the zones of radioactive contamination due to the Chernobyl disaster.
