Loading ...By Andrew Roth
The Washington Post
KHIMKI, RUSSIA —
For days, police and dozens of truckers planning to paralyze Moscow in a vehicular act of protest have played a game of hide-and-seek, as the drivers prepare to ride on the capital in force.
At 12 a.m. Friday, nearly half of the fledgling revolutionaries were trapped in an Ikea parking lot on the outskirts of Moscow, blocked by police.
The demonstration of about 100 trucks near Moscow is the first of its kind in years.
“If as many as we expected had come, we could have made demands of the government,” said Sergey Vladimirov, one of the protest coordinators, as his allies stamped their feet to stave off fatigue and the frost. The air smelled of fumes. Vladimirov looked as if he might collapse. “Now all we can do is make them hear us.”
Their anger stems from a new toll system called Platon (derived from the Russian “Pay-per-ton”), which will levy charges on trucks weighing more than 12 tons and is projected to raise hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The truckers say the tolls will bankrupt them. And they are angry that the company managing the system is owned by the son of one of President Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends. The Kremlin denies that nepotism played a role in the toll decision.
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