A deputy mayor in the Russian city of Voronezh has called local residents “toxic and ungrateful” after weeks of public anger over uncollected household waste, local media reported Tuesday.
Deputy Mayor Lyudmila Borodina's comments came amid reports of a waste management crisis in the neighboring town of Semiluki, where residents told the Ostorozhno Novosti news outlet that garbage bins have been missing from a major road for a month and that their complaints on social media have gone unanswered.
“I want to say that we live quite well. Our people who work for businesses and citizens work practically around the clock to make sure we are comfortable. But the level of gratitude and toxicity among Voronezh residents is completely different,” the local outlet Bloknot quoted Borodina as saying at a business forum Tuesday.
Borodina added that major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg were no cleaner than Voronezh despite their much larger budgets.
“Show me a place that's cleaner than Voronezh,” she said. “I visit Moscow and St. Petersburg just as often, and even those cities with their huge budgets aren't cleaner. And with the funding they receive, the same broken tiles, Voronezh squeezes out everything it can within the budget that is agreed upon.”
According to the outlet Trud Chernozemya, Borodina appeared at the event carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag valued at up to 480,000 rubles ($5,900, according to spot foreign exchange market data from Reuters) in Moscow’s TsUM department store.
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