Truckers win support from Siberia's naked protester

Liana Klevtsova, 19, is already famous for her campaign against what she claims is a high cost of living in Russia. Now she has peeled off to support Russia truckers seeking to overturn a tax which they claim benefits the family of a close friend of Vladimir Putin.

The levy has become known as the 'Rotenberg tax' - or Platon tax - because the government entrusted collection to a company controlled by the son of billionaire  Arkady Rotenberg, once the president's judo sparring partner.

Truckers have established two camps on the outskirts of the Russian capital and protests involved at least 56 regions, including those in Siberia. At a meeting in Omsk on Saturday, a key demand was the abolition of the Platon tax, even though the Kremlin has made some concessions in the past week.

Student Liana said she was backing the protests to express 'support to the entire community of freight commercial transportation'. The tax came on top of 'unbelievable prices for petrol, corruption schemes and extortion on the roads', she alleged. 

'It would be possible to agree with the necessity of this system but only if we had really good quality roads under our feet,' she said. 'Once again it feels like asking 'Where are the taxes we pay? VAT? Transport tax?'. 

'In this image we wanted to show our sarcastic attitude towards the Platon system. As we know from a school physics course on pressure: the pressure of a girl wearing high heels on the ground is a lot more than the pressure of a massive elephant.

'Why don't officials suggest extortion from those who wear high-heels, this way protecting Russian roads from devastating factors, not from their own lack of consciousness?'

Amendments to the new tax system in recent days fines for not paying the federal road tax by up to a hundredfold, but the concessions do not satisfy the truckers.