Watchdog

A Russian activist who was jailed after raising concern about the environmental impact of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi has gone on a hunger strike.

The Environmental Watch on North Caucasus, a nongovernmental organization focusing on the southern Russian region where the Sochi Games were held, said that Yevgeny Vitishko began a hunger strike on April 7 to protest the Supreme Court's refusal to consider his appeal on March 20.

Vitishko was initially handed a three-year suspended sentence in 2012 for spray-painting the fence of a property in a forest where construction was banned.

But In December 2013, a court in the city of Tuapse ruled that he had violated the terms of the sentence and sent him to prison.

A higher court upheld that decision in February 2014.

The prominent Moscow-based human rights group Memorial considers Vitishko a political prisoner, and Amnesty International has named him a "prisoner of conscience."

MOSCOW -- The Russian Justice Ministry has added Transparency International Russia to its list of organizations designated as "foreign agents."

The ministry's announcement on April 7 brought the number of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations listed as foreign agents to 50.

President Vladimir Putin signed a law in 2012 that requires NGOs that receive foreign funding and are deemed to be engaged in political activities to register as organizations "performing the functions of a foreign agent."

Rights activists, Kremlin critics, and Western governments say the designation deliberately and unfairly suggests the groups are involved in espionage.

They see it as part of a campaign to silence dissent and rein in civil society during Putin's third presidential term.

Also on April 7, a court in the Volga region city of Samara ordered a local NGO, the Ecological Training Center, to pay a 150,000 rubles ($2,750) fine for refusal to register as a foreign agent.