Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg: The Extraordinary Story of the Arctic 30

EPILOGUE

Sini Saarela wants to jump. She’s not sure she can do it, but that’s what she wants to do.

It could be the most foolish thing she’s ever done. The water’s freezing cold, she knows it from the spray thrown up by the police speedboats. Even if she does it, even if she jumps, there’s still no way she’ll make it to the jetty. The sea is teeming with Dutch police and coastguard boats and there’s a line of cops on the wharf, maybe twenty officers fingering their handcuffs and looking down at her. She’ll have to swim fifty metres, maybe eighty, then haul herself up a ladder. That’s what she’ll have to do if she wants to lock herself to the oil pumps and stop the supertanker docking. But first she has to jump in with a rucksack full of rope on her back. She’s wearing a helmet, a thick drysuit, a climbing suit, a climbing harness and a life jacket. She’d be throwing herself in without even knowing if she floats.

She looks over the edge of the RHIB at the churning water and screws her hands into fists.

It’s May 2014, eighteen weeks since she left St Petersburg, and Vladimir Putin has just fired the starting gun on the Arctic oil rush. It was on a video link between the Kremlin and the Prirazlomnaya. He congratulated Gazprom on ‘a big event’ that ‘marks the start of our country’s ambitious plans for developing production of Arctic mineral and oil resources’.[120] Then Gazprom said the first oil from icy Arctic waters was being loaded onto a tanker that would soon set sail for the Dutch port of Rotterdam, to be refined and pumped into Europe’s cars.

The Mikhail Ulyanov is 250 metres long,[121] the size of a skyscraper lying on its side, and now it’s casting a shadow over Sini. It’s only going at four knots and it barely makes a noise but it’s drifting towards the jetty in Rotterdam harbour. Sini is standing at the bow of a Greenpeace RHIB. Behind her, looking over her shoulder, are Phil Ball and four other climbers – two Germans, a Dutchwoman and a guy from Finland.

A minute ago they had a plan. The RHIB was going to drop them at the bottom of a ladder at the jetty and they were going to climb it and lock themselves to the oil pumps. But then a police boat barrelled in and a cop jumped into their RHIB and pulled the kill cord on the engine. He stuffed the cord into his pocket and jumped back into his own boat, so now Sini and the others are drifting on the water between the tanker and the wharf, and their plan is a busted flush.

‘But that fucking dirty oil was coming in from Russia,’ Sini recalls. ‘I felt very strongly that I wanted to get between the ship and the jetty. I wanted to say, “You’re not bringing that shit in here.”’

Sini wants to jump. Without that kill cord the RHIB can’t get her to the ladder, so the only way she’ll reach the jetty is if she swims it. But if she jumps she’ll be alone in the water. There’s no way the others are going to follow her in, they’re carrying the same weight of kit as she is, and by the look on their faces they’re not thinking what she’s thinking. And if she jumps she’ll have to swim through a constellation of police boats and get to the ladder before the cops on the jetty can reach it, and that’s just not going to happen.

The Mikhail Ulyanov is close now, maybe a hundred metres away. Pete Willcox managed to slow the tanker’s progress for a while, he was at the wheel of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior III when she cut across the tanker and blocked its entrance into the harbour. But Dutch commandos broke into the bridge of the Warrior and seized control from Pete – ‘Okay, so what else is new?’ – and now the Russian ship is minutes from landing that Arctic oil.

Since she got home, life hasn’t been easy for Sini. Dozens of journalists were waiting for her when she pulled into the train station in Helsinki. When she was in Russia she had no idea how famous she’d become. Now she’s recognised in the street, the focus of a baffling, intense public interest.

‘It got so personal about me. In the beginning I couldn’t even go to the market because people were almost dropping their shopping baskets and staring at me. It was horrible. I didn’t like it. There were lots of people who came up and talked to me, which is not like Finnish people. Of course it was very nice if it was positive because you could say thank you for the support. But then there was also negative feedback.’

Negative feedback. She means abuse in the street from people she’s never met.

She wants to jump but she doesn’t think the others will follow her in. And if she goes alone she can’t hope to pull this thing off. But if she knew for sure the others would jump as well, she’d do it now.

Faiza Oulahsen is standing on the deck of the campaign ship Argus, 500 metres away, watching the police clear a path for the tanker’s approach towards the jetty. ‘And I could almost smell the thing I went to prison for, it was so close. The first tanker of Arctic oil, the very thing we were trying to stop six months earlier, and it’s coming into my home country. It was misty and foggy and dark and I had a flashback to the platform and the Russian coastguard standing between the Arctic Sunrise and the Prirazlomnaya, with the authorities protecting the interests of Arctic oil.’

Frank isn’t in Rotterdam. He’s concentrating on his family right now, trying to make sense of what happened back there in Russia. ‘I was in prison for all the right reasons,’ he says. ‘That’s how I feel. We were crucified and taken to the cleaners, properly imprisoned, so you knew you were having an effect somewhere, and that kept me going. But you have to compare that to the nights where you convinced yourself you’re looking at ten years for piracy. Then you’re very vulnerable. Very worried. Very down.’

In his final diary entry, on 10 January, a few days after returning to London from that family holiday, he wrote:

Denis is back behind a camera, capturing new chapters in his country’s long and storied history. After the amnesty he visited his newly freed friends from Pussy Riot, then he headed to Kiev to cover a revolution that would soon spark conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Everywhere he goes he’s recognised and saluted, but he finds the attention embarrassing. ‘You know Solzhenitsyn, he spent ten or fifteen years in jail, so it’s a shame when people say, “Respect to you, you’re a prisoner.” It’s bullshit. It was only two months in prison. Compare that to the people before.’ And the amnesty? Does he still regret accepting it? ‘Actually now I think it was a nice decision, because there is war with Ukraine so nobody cares about Greenpeace any more. We could easily have got three years in prison and nobody would care.’

Popov got promoted, Kieron got married, Dima quit smoking and Pete went home to Maggy. From now on Pete Willcox is going to be more careful about which direct action protests he signs up for. ‘I got a little too close there in Russia.’ But he’s here in Rotterdam, on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior. ‘I’m still campaigning to change our thirst for fossil fuels. Turning over the world to the oil and coal companies is not an option.’

Dima’s great-grandfather helped build and sustain an empire, his father and grandfather were leading lights in a movement that brought it down, but because of a protest that lasted a few minutes it’s likely Dima will never again see the country of his birth. And now, despite everything he went through out there, Gazprom is bringing that Arctic oil into Europe.

‘I went to the Arctic to actually do something,’ he says, ‘so there’s nothing to regret. Scientists say we can only stay safe if we keep atmospheric carbon dioxide levels below about 350 parts per million. Three hundred and fifty, that’s the limit. We can’t stay above that for long without fucking it all up. If it hits 400 then our kids are gonna be in very big trouble indeed. When my great-grandfather was jailed, CO₂ stood at 290. When my grandfather was jailed it was 310. When my father was jailed it was at 320. Three months before we took action at the Prirazlomnaya, NASA announced that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had just hit 400. It’s happening. This is not a rehearsal. This requires resistance.’

Pavel Litvinov sees similarities and differences between his iconic protest in 1968 and the stand taken by his son half a century later. He faced certain trial and jail or exile, whereas his son didn’t think he would face the full wrath of the Kremlin. ‘The protests are different, of course,’ says Pavel, ‘but in a way the challenge that Dima and I both had in front of us was similar. We both wanted to speak up for somebody who was attacked by a large totalitarian government. In my case we spoke in defence of a small country, Czechoslovakia, which was suddenly oppressed by its big neighbour. And in the case of Dima he was speaking for the Arctic, which also didn’t have its own defence, and to some degree the defence of the Arctic is a metaphor for the defence of humans and human rights. It is our life, because if the Arctic cannot survive then neither can we. It is our canary in the coal mine. If life is unbearable there then it will become unbearable to us. So there was a similarity. You try to raise a voice because you have nothing but your voice. A voice to speak up for something which cannot speak up for itself.’

In Murmansk SIZO-1 the prisoners are still fighting the regime, but they’re not winning. ‘I got a letter just two weeks ago from my cellmate,’ says Denis. ‘The situation there is terrible now, it’s much worse than in our time. Those conditions were good, created specially for us. We had two or three cellmates in one room and we were allowed this doroga. We had TV sets and some people from a local NGO came to check on us. But when we left the prison nobody came to them and the authorities took away their TV sets. Now there are body searches and night searches almost every day and the meals have become water.’

Martin Sixsmith – the ex-BBC man – is on his way to lunch with the former director of MI5, when he makes time for a cup of Darjeeling tea with some of the campaigners. Together they conduct a post-mortem on why Putin freed the Arctic 30.

‘One word,’ says Sixsmith. ‘“Sochi”. Putin was clearing the decks before the Olympics. It wasn’t a surprise that Pussy Riot got out, and I wasn’t at all surprised that the Arctic 30 got out. Khodorkovsky, that was the big surprise. It’s the old thing about speaking quietly while carrying a big stick. Greenpeace had that stick. The Olympics.

‘You guys said your plan was to give him “a wide turning circle”. That was sensible. It gave him room to back down. Right now our governments are hammering away at Putin, accusing him of everything without understanding his dilemma, giving him no margin to make concessions and be sensible. It was absolutely clear that Greenpeace had to give him that opportunity to back down without losing face. He didn’t want to keep the thirty in jail for ever, they would have been a thorn in his side. So he wanted to let them go, but he wanted to do it on his terms. It was the right thing to not hammer away at him, shouting and screaming. That way he could present the release as an act of magnanimity rather than him being bullied into it.

‘If you look at it objectively, I think Putin played it just right. He showed himself to be tough then he let the thirty go. He showed himself to be magnanimous, having made his point, so everybody was happy. Yes, Greenpeace was petrified their people would never get out, but they were happy eventually. But most importantly his voters were extremely happy because they saw him standing up for them. Putin’s image is this non-drinker, a judo fanatic, ex-KGB, takes no nonsense, dresses smart and stands up to the West. Stands up to people like the activists on that ship. So it was really important for his image to do what he did. When Putin does his analysis he’ll probably think he came out on the plus side.

‘Was it naïve of Greenpeace to think they could go in there, poke the bear and walk away? I assume the campaign leaders took all that into account when they went out there. They knew they’d be arrested, and in terms of publicity, having the guys arrested and jailed was a PR bonanza. It was unfortunate for the ones in jail, but good for the campaign.’

By the time they were freed, 2.7 million people had called for the release of the Arctic 30. Millions more are demanding a sanctuary at the top of the world where oil drilling and industrial fishing are banned. Something similar already exists in Antarctica after a campaign that took nearly twenty years to win. The push for an Arctic sanctuary may take longer, but the movement is mobilising. The fossil fuel companies have colonised almost every corner of the Earth, but if that movement can draw a line in the ice, if it can make its stand in the Arctic and win, then it can roll south and challenge the rule of oil across the globe.

Two weeks before the action at the Prirazlomnaya, one of the seven Arctic states, Finland – Sini’s home country – became the first nation to join the call for an Arctic sanctuary. Six months later the European Parliament echoed that call.

Sometimes someone just has to jump first.

‘As long as they continue with their dangerous plans then we’re going to be there,’ says Sini. ‘The Arctic oil industry has decided to keep going, so we have to keep going too. It’s not like we want to, but standing against them gives me a belief that we can actually win.’

Right now Sini’s boat is drifting on the wake, floating away from the jetty as the Mikhail Ulyanov comes in. It’s nearly docked now. She can see the faces of the Russian crew leaning over the railings and staring down at her. If she’s going to jump, it has to be now.

She throws herself forward, for a split second she’s hanging in the air then she crashes into the water. The cold is paralysing, she sinks below the surface but her life jacket lifts her, she gasps for air, shakes her head then kicks her legs. Back on the RHIB, Phil rolls his eyes. Everything inside him is saying, oh shit, now you have to jump as well. He hates swimming and he’s got all this kit strapped to him. ‘But I can see the ship, that big bastard ship, it’s so close and if we can get to the jetty we stand a real chance of stopping it. And Sini was already swimming for it.’ He coughs into his hand and steps up onto the side of the RHIB. ‘And I just did it. I threw myself in.’

The police take a moment to notice what’s happening, but the cops on the jetty don’t move and the boats in the water are too far away to reach them. Sini turns her head and looks back and sees Phil swimming behind her. And the other climbers are launching themselves into the sea as well. A moment later they’re all in the water, kicking hard, six of them, all weighed down with kit but getting closer. Then Sini reaches out and grabs the bottom rung of the ladder and hauls herself up.

Faiza is watching from the deck of the Argus, but the huge hull of the Mikhail Ulyanov is blocking her view and she can’t see what’s happening. Then her phone rings. It’s the team on the jetty. They tell her they’re hanging from the ladder, stopping that tanker from unloading its cargo of Arctic oil.

‘For me it was very logical,’ Sini remembers. ‘The issue hadn’t changed, it was the same fucking dirty oil, why wouldn’t I protest against it? They’d started drilling and this was the first oil coming from that platform. My motivations hadn’t changed in jail, if anything they’d become stronger. So in the end, whether or not I’d jump, I guess it wasn’t really a question.’