“They took out their knives and just started stabbing”: When Putin attacked Greenpeace | TV & Radio

TThe sun had barely risen on September 18, 2013, when Sini Saarela began to fear she was drowning. The climate activist attempted to occupy Prirazlomnaya – a bright red oil platform in Russia’s Pechora Sea – and the situation became increasingly difficult. Workers used water cannon to prevent her and her colleague Marco Weber from climbing up, crushing them under a continuous torrent of ice-cold water. He showed signs of hypothermia.

“It was a terrifying experience,” Saarela says today in a video call from her home in Finland. That’s certainly how it seems in the new BBC documentary On Thin Ice: Putin vs Greenpeace. The gripping six-part series tells the inside story of the Arctic 30, a group of Greenpeace activists who wanted to stop work on the first offshore oil rig in the Russian Arctic and ended up becoming pawns in Vladimir Putin’s power struggle with the West. Compiled from footage shot by the 28 activists and two journalists on board (some of it smuggled out of prison), it is this moment, as Saarela hangs on the edge of Prirazlomnaya, that the show really starts.

The ordeal that followed saw the group face armed coast guards, their boat seized by FSB officers and them spending two months in a Russian prison for a crime they did not commit. “Surreal,” Saarela describes it. “I was waiting for someone to come and say, ‘Yes, we’re kidding!'”

The protest had been months in the making, aimed at drawing attention to increasing oil production in the Arctic, and was led by, among others, Frank Hewetson, a maritime operations specialist from London (who was banned in three countries and arrested in many more for his work for Greenpeace), and Dima Litvinov, a Soviet-born activist living in Sweden who was chairman of the board of Greenpeace Russia at the time.

The plan was for the crew to approach the rig by boat. Nearby, a team would board a rubber dinghy, rush there and try to hoist a waterproof capsule onto the platform in which two activists could live for several days. For Litvinov, this was essential work. “By that time, we had already found four times more oil, gas and coal than we could burn without causing a complete climate catastrophe,” he says. “Opening new frontiers, looking for more, seemed crazy to me.”

Watching the documentary now, after a decade of covering Russia’s spread of misinformation and invasion of neighboring countries, one cannot help but wonder if the group was naive when it planned such a protest on Putin’s territory. These were Western activists trying to disrupt the production of Russia’s most valuable commodity. Did they not expect serious retaliation? Especially considering that there had been violent arrests of local activists like Pussy Riot in the months before?

“The short answer is no,” says Litvinov. The experts he spoke to and his previous work in Russia led him to believe that “either nothing would happen or we would be arrested, dragged ashore, held for a few days and then thrown out.” Hewetson adds that “the shock of how we were treated came partly from the fact that Greenpeace had attempted to occupy the same rig 12 months earlier and the coast guard had “literally done nothing.”

This time, that was not the case. When the group attempted to occupy the rig – which is operated by the majority state-owned energy giant Gazprom – Russian coast guardsmen rammed Hewetson and his team with their boats, brandishing weapons and firing warning shots into the water, dangerously close to the rig. “They took out their knives and immediately started stabbing the sides of our (inflatable) boats – bang, bang, bang,” says Hewetson.

Soon after, Saarela and Weber were arrested. The now 42-year-old, who was locked up on the coast guard ship, became worried. She heard Russian maritime police firing their cannons at the Arctic 30, but couldn’t tell if they were threatening her fellow activists or attacking her boat. “I tried to read their faces and thought to myself, ‘Okay, would they look like this if 28 people had just died?'” Within 24 hours, balaclava-clad military police boarded the Greenpeace ship by helicopter and illegally took control as it was in international waters. “I was running up the stairs to the bridge when they knocked me down on Frank,” Litvinov says. “It was a surprise how controlling they were, the size of their weapons, the uniforms, no IDs, covered faces… The efficiency.”

Hewetson adds: “I think the cruelest thing they did was raid the shops (where we keep the alcohol). I remember thinking, ‘You’re armed And you’re mad?!'”

It took five days for the boat to reach the Russian coastal city of Murmansk. The crew spent that time caught up in the chaos, still convinced that their stay in Russia would only last a few days before they would be deported. When they went to court and heard that they were being charged with piracy – a crime punishable by 15 years in prison in Russia – and that they would be held in pre-trial detention for two months, it was devastating. “Then I was scared,” says Saarela. “I realized that I had completely lost control: It doesn’t matter what you say or do, it has no impact on whether you get out.”

On Thin Ice: Putin vs. Greenpeace adds context to Saarela’s fears. Interviews with Russians involved in the Arctic 30 arrest reveal Putin’s involvement. Igor Volobuev, Gazprom’s former communications chief, says the president wanted to make an example of the activists to prove his strength. Local media ran smear stories about the crew, such as that they were carrying a bomb and that police found heroin on the boat. Greenpeace is getting involved in this political tennis game. Activists are organizing protests at Gazprom-sponsored events. Paul McCartney is commissioned to write a letter to Putin. (He is apparently the only Western celebrity with influence in Russia.)

What was life like in prison for the activists while all this was happening? Isolated, they say. The women of the Arctic 30 were kept in solitary confinement. The men were in shared cells, but separated from each other. They were given one hour of exercise a day in a cell that was “covered with a wire mesh on top so you couldn’t see the sky, but the rain could still get in,” Litvinov says.

Although he had been in prison before, Hewetson, 59, found the Russian prison harsh. He was wracked with guilt over what his team went through, and the prospect of spending 15 years in prison, away from his wife and two teenage daughters, haunted him. “For 23 hours a day, you’re left to your own thoughts and fears,” he says. He recalls one particularly bad night when he found it difficult not to fall into a “spiral of despair.” “My immediate fear was losing control in front of my two cellmates,” he says.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when the activist is given coins to call his family, only to find that each one only lasts a few seconds. “It was a nightmare,” he says, as he shoved coin after coin into the payphone, barely managing to console his sobbing daughter before the line was cut. “It felt like torture.”

For Saarela, the “most disturbing” moment came when the group’s charges were changed from piracy, which seemed far-fetched, to hooliganism, which Putin used to condemn political activists. A switch flipped in her mind. “In the end, I was not afraid, I was mad”, she says. “I felt it was an injustice what happened to us and other activists in Russia.”

The group was finally released on bail in November 2013, before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled that the FSB’s boarding of the Greenpeace boat was illegal. A month later, the group was among a number of activists, including Pussy Riot, released as part of an amnesty ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics. “The first breath of freedom was wonderful,” says Litvinov. He believes the group was lucky to be released: “We were the canary in the mine. Our arrest came at the very turning point from turning away from the previous ‘free’ Russia regime to defection from it.” Hewetson is thinking about this a lot these days. “I follow Russia constantly in the news. I’m obsessed with what’s happening in Ukraine,” he says.

All three activists are still passionate environmental activists. They say the experience in Russia changed them. For Saarela, now a mother of two, it changed her life. “I used to be quite desperate about the fight against climate change. I was scared. But when we went to prison and the support (we got) and people started to speak up for the Arctic and the climate, it really gave me hope.” Does she regret taking part? “Never. That gave me strength in prison: I knew I had done the right thing.”

On thin ice: Putin vs. Greenpeace is underway BBC Two At 9 June at 9 o’clock in the evening.