Valery's eyes burn ice blue as he stares towards the Black Sea coast just yards from his house. The local government has given him three months to pack up and leave, as the country begins preparing to turn Sochi and its environs into an Olympic playland. "We built our houses with our own hard-earned money, unlike [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin," said Valery, who makes his living fixing refrigerators. "Why should his children and the oligarchs' children get to play in the sea while ours are chased into the mountains?"

.: © Vasily Shaposhnikov

Residents of Imeret lowland, which has been chosen to as a construction site for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, clashed with bailiffs and police yesterday, July 22, 2008. Armed with sticks and bottles of incendiary mixture, 200 locals defended their houses.

A Moscow press conference of ecologists, human rights activists and Sochi residents has suggested that the International Olympic Committee(IOC) has grounds to cancel the winter Olympic Games, set to take place in the Black Sea resort of Sochi in 2014. The press-conference, titled “The 2014 Sochi Olympics. Opportunism, incompetence, disregard for the law – the major threat to the collapse of the National Project,” met in Moscow on April 10th.