LONDON (Reuters) – Some employees at Russian oil giant Rosneft are resisting pressure to attend a celebratory show in a Moscow stadium on Friday to mark the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, three sources at the company told Reuters.
The sources said they were unwilling to take part because they saw the event as an endorsement of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and has used the peninsula as one of the springboards for the invasion of its southern neighbour that it launched on Feb. 24.
State media announced this week that a show to celebrate the “reunification” of Russia and Crimea would be held in Luzhniki stadium, with capacity of over 80,000 people.
“We understand that it would be in support of the war and everybody in the office understands this,” one Rosneft employee said on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals.
“No way can we support a war,” the employee said, adding she would use her day off as an excuse not to attend the event.
Rosneft did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The three staff members said the company, whose boss Igor Sechin is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, plans to bus its employees to the venue during working hours.
A second employee said she had told her boss she would not go. “I don’t want to show I support this calamity,” she said, referring to the war in Ukraine.
A third employee said she had been told by a manager that she had to go because the event was being held during work hours, adding she was not sure she could avoid attending.
“I have relatives in Ukraine. I want people to be told the truth about what is happening there,” she said.
Thousands of people have been detained in Russia since Putin sent his forces into Ukraine in what he calls a special military operation to disarm and “denazify” the democratic country of 44 million people.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Mark Trevelyan and Gareth Jones)
