Over the past few months, Ilya Tsarev has regularly joined dozens of other people on a large wooden cross in a forest near his hometown of Likino-Dulovo to look down the Road and bulldozers.

President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have been pushed to their lowest level in more than a decade by declining living standards. With that in mind, the Kremlin has made rare concessions to provincial protesters, including suspending the construction of a Cathedral in Yekaterinburg that would have destroyed the Park.

Work on the construction of the proposed megadam on pine forest in Cheese, an abandoned village 20 hours by train North-East of Moscow, was temporarily halted after local residents from surrounding cities took up the protest camp for six months.

But plans to modernize the waste industry continue apace as the Kremlin tries to modernize Russia’s outdated waste disposal system, which recycles less than 5 percent. Under the new regime, the government aims to store less waste in landfills and build facilities for recycling or incineration.

In practice, however, contractors are incentivized by the fees they receive for disposing of garbage by volume rather than sorting it for recycling, which encourages them to build landfills. Russia also has yet to take measures that compensate or relocate people who live near the new landfills, says Boris Morgunov, Dean of the environmental faculty of the Moscow higher school of Economics.

The benefits were mostly limited to the capital. Moscow is building the largest road network among all urban areas in the world, except Beijing, and plans by 2023 more than twice as much as in 2011.

Beijing is undermining Tibetan monastic education by significantly increasing enrollment in public boarding schools.