Sochi's struggling locals
With a $50-billion price tag, the Sochi Winter Olympics will be an extravagant event, supposed to showcase Russia to the world. Yet for many living in the host city, preparations for the Games have caused more problems than pleasure.
These Sochi residents live on a street where locals say that since the erection of pylons to supply power to Olympic venues, the hillside above their houses has been gradually giving way, triggering damaging landslides.
A general view shows a stone quarry above the village of Akhshtyr, a district of Sochi. The quarry, one of two above the village, is located in a nature reserve and produces gravel for the construction of 2014 Winter Games venues.
Grigory Topkaryan, a resident of Akhshtyr, is reflected in his car's rear-view mirror as he looks at the construction site of a railway tunnel nearby.
Topkaryan moves the handle of a well that has gone dry since the construction of transport tunnels and the excavation of a quarry near Akhshtyr.
P. Grigoryan, another Akhshtyr resident, talks with a water delivery man bringing supplies to the village.
Saven Topkaryan and his wife Irina receive their weekly delivery of water.
A villager fills up a bathtub in his garden with his water ration for the week.
Sedrak Torosyan (left) and his daughter Margarita (2nd left) rest in front of their home in Ternovaya Street. Locals say they have suffered property damage from landslides since pylons transporting power to Olympic venues were built on the hill above their houses.
Irina Borochkova, another Ternovaya Street resident, sits outside a container where she now lives, after her house was severely damaged by a landslide.
Tatiana Skiba sits between her two houses, both damaged by a landslide on Sochi’s Bakinskaya Street. Skiba blames the accident on a dump used by a company involved in Sochi's pre-Olympic construction boom.
A crack runs along the wall of the house where Skiba now lives. She moved here from the house next door, after the landslide made it uninhabitable. However, this newer house is also sinking on its foundations.
Furniture in Skiba's kitchen stands at a crooked angle after the damage.
Alexei Kravets rummages through belongings he saved from his house after being forcibly evicted in the course of construction work ahead of the Olympics.
Kravets poses on the site of his former property. He battled eviction for over a year until his belongings were thrown into the street and his house demolished in 2012, he said. He added that he has not received compensation, and he has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to consider his case.
A man walks past an illegal housing development, one of many that have sprung up in the shadow of official competition venues and hotels that are being built for the Games.
Workers remove a window in one such unlawful development. Some 450 illegal buildings have been demolished on court orders since the beginning of 2013, local media reported.
The window of an illegal housing development overlooks the Olympic Park.
A worker watches an excavator demolish an illegal building.
Construction waste piles up in the countryside near Ternovaya Street in Sochi.
A man walks past colourful new apartments that stand out incongruously in the Golubye Dali district of the city.
