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

by Ben Stewart

  Hopes are turning towards an Amnesty Bill passing through the Duma – the lower house of Russia’s parliament. The amnesty is scheduled to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of Russia’s constitution in December 1993. The Bill is set to free many thousands of prisoners across Russia, but at its first reading in the Duma it becomes clear that in its current form it won’t apply to the Arctic 30. The text covers hooliganism – the crime the crew are charged with – but only for people already convicted. Pussy Riot will qualify, but not Greenpeace. Powerful figures in the Duma indicate their support for a broader amnesty, but ultimately it’s for Putin to decide if the saga will now end.116

  One week before Christmas Day the Amnesty Bill comes back before the Russian parliament for a final vote. At the last minute an amendment is inserted to include not only those convicted of hooliganism, but also those accused of it.117 As things stand, the Arctic 30 are now included. At 4 p.m. Moscow time there’s a vote in the Duma. About half the activists are clustered around tables in the hotel bar, watching the debate on computer screens. When the result comes through, it’s resounding. The Amnesty Bill is passed. But the moment feels oddly anticlimactic.

  Silence. Somebody sniffs. A few of them take sips of beer but nobody proposes a toast. This is not how anybody imagined it would be during the darkest days of their ordeal. A journalist approaches them. He raises a video camera, but there’s nothing to film. He asks if they can contrive a celebration, and Sini – always keen to accommodate people – fakes a hug with Phil and breaks into an unconvincing smile. Then she sits down and shakes her head.

  ‘They can put that fucking amnesty up their arse,’ she mutters. ‘I don’t want to have an amnesty from Mr Putin. He was in the wrong all along. I didn’t do anything I need to be amnestied for. He wants us to say thank you for his forgiveness. No way.’

  The following day Putin holds his annual press conference in Moscow. It’s a national event. Two thousand journalists are invited; the questions have already been decided. He announces that Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the most high-profile political prisoner in Russia, will also be freed.118 Then he confirms the Arctic 30 will be amnestied. But he says their ordeal should serve as a lesson. Putin says he suspects the Greenpeace protest at the oil platform was an ‘attempt at blackmail and extortion, or they were carrying out somebody’s order to stop our work’.119

  ‘Screw you,’ Dima shouts at the screen. ‘You don’t owe me an amnesty, you owe me an apology.’

  Khodorkovsky, Pussy Riot and the Arctic 30. The Kremlin is taking out the trash before the Winter Olympics in Sochi in six weeks. None of the activists is happy that their freedom comes wrapped in Putin’s magnanimity, but they know they won’t get home unless they take the amnesty. It’s the only way to avoid a court case on trumped-up charges, then years in a Russian prison.

  But Denis Sinyakov can’t do it. He knows some of the leading figures in the Russian opposition movement. He was photographing Pussy Riot’s protests before they were famous. He says he won’t sign the amnesty. He wants to fight the case in court.

  ‘I don’t care about Putin,’ he says. ‘This is about my truth. My lawyer says we should go to trial and fight like lions. He says if we accept it we’ll just help the investigators and the authorities to win.’

  Denis’s decision is an earthquake. Mads Christensen and his team have been told it’s all or nothing – either thirty people take the amnesty or the politics of the moment get complicated. The campaigners think the others might not be allowed to leave Russia if anyone refuses Putin’s offer. A rumour goes around that ten people have already been granted the amnesty but that the process has now been halted. People are saying the investigators aren’t signing off amnesties for the others because of Denis. But when Denis and his lawyer investigate, they find that’s not true.

  Video conference meetings involving people on multiple continents are dominated by the Denis dilemma. People are throwing their hands up or banging their heads on the table, saying, ‘Can’t someone just speak to him?’ or ‘Doesn’t he understand what’s at stake here?’ It’s like a powerful wind is blowing the campaigners towards an outcome that suits both Greenpeace and the Kremlin, one where they both sweep their pieces off the chessboard and declare a draw. Denis gets fifteen, maybe twenty phone calls. He’s subjected to pressure from every corner. He’s not sure who to believe. Nobody is. But eventually, for the good of everybody, he gives in and signs the amnesty. But he feels cheated. By the investigators and by Greenpeace.

  ‘It means we get our freedom,’ Phil tells the others in the bar that night. ‘But I agree with Denis. He wanted to fight it through the courts. But the thing is, you can’t trust the system here. I want justice to be done and this amnesty isn’t justice. They haven’t dropped the fucking charges. The amnesty sucks. It feels shit, it feels like a letdown. But we have to admit, it’s the news we wanted. It’s the only hope we have to get out. It’s the only way we’re going to get home.’

  ‘In life, everything comes and goes,’ says Camila. ‘Let’s look at it differently. Maybe one day we’ll give them amnesty, but for a crime they did commit.’

  It’s Christmas, ninety-nine days since the protest, five weeks since the Arctic 30 were released from prison. All they need now is a stamp in their passports that says they can go home.

  Frank Hewetson’s diary

  25th December

  Despite being kept waiting for 30 minutes in a cab while [French activist] Franky Pisanu had coffee + ciggies, we made it to the Investigative Committee in time. Process was quick and 3 of us with our respective lawyers departed at 12:00 with our copies of signed amnesty. This officially halts the prosecution case against us. What a very strange Christmas morning. Off to the migration service at 3pm to hopefully complete the final process of this farce + get an exit visa.

  26th December

  Quite a momentous day with everyone of A30 focused on travel plans + returning home. Dima L actually leaving tonight on train to Helsinki and then ferry to Stockholm. I’ve still yet to see my travel tickets to and back from holiday with the family. Looking forward to hugging the whole family, running into the sea and knocking back too many cold beers.

  Dima is sat in the hotel lobby with the head of the media team, writing a statement for the press. His train is leaving in two hours. When he’s finished writing it he pushes his spectacles up his nose and spins the laptop around. ‘Release that,’ he says, then he throws his pink bag over his shoulder, takes his wife’s hand and walks through the doors of the hotel and out onto a St Petersburg street. Two hours later, just after midnight, when his visa becomes valid, he approaches the border with Finland.

  The female border guard surveys his passport. She reads a letter from the Investigative Committee explaining that they’ve decided not to prosecute Dima for entering Russia illegally. The guard folds the letter and slides it back into the passport.

  ‘You people are trouble,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Why don’t you protest in America? Only in Russia. You are against Russia.’

  ‘Actually I’ve protested many times in America.’

  ‘Huh. Well maybe you should stay there.’ She holds out his passport, he takes it, she moves on to the next person. Two minutes later the train crosses the border. He’s in Finland.

  From that first day in Murmansk at the Investigative Committee headquarters, Dima has felt a fist of fear in his stomach. It tightened then loosened then tightened again, depending on how scared he was, but it was always there. But when the train crosses the frontier, it lets go. And for the first time he feels truly free.

  As he’s heading towards Helsinki, the rest of the crew are gathered in the hotel bar, coming to terms with a wide selection of potent Russian alcohol. That night everybody stays up until 4 a.m. They want to spend every last minute together. It could be a long time before they see each other again. An hour after they call it a night, their alarms go off. Alex, Sini
and Camila sit on the bed in Alex’s room and hold each other. It’s time to leave.

  At St Petersburg airport activists are dispersed across the check-in counters, about to scatter to destinations all over the surface of the Earth. Alex, Kieron, Phil, Anthony and the British engineer Iain Rogers are flying to Paris then taking the train into London. Po-Paul is with them, he’s taking a connection to Montreal. But Frank isn’t. He’s leaving alone, heading for a rendezvous with a family holiday.

  The plane to Paris is full. Almost all the other passengers are well-dressed Russians. The aircraft taxies onto the runway then waits. Five minutes pass, another five, nothing. Nobody says much. Anthony makes a phone call, the others just stare ahead, waiting. Finally the engines fire and the plane launches down the runway. As it lifts off, Phil punches the air.

  Frank Hewetson’s diary

  27th December

  That was quite a night of celebration. Finding it pretty hard-going this morning. Had a phone call from Anthony on the plane. Said it was a media scrum at the terminal. He talked me through the TAXI and TAKE-OFF! ‘See you on the other side …’ He’s very relieved to be out of there. Feels a bit weird being the last Brit left in Russia of the A30.

  In Paris they board the Eurostar, destination London. It races through northern France, towns and villages fly past the window. There’s a sucking sound as the train enters the Channel Tunnel, and twenty minutes later they burst out into the English countryside. The train slows as they approach St Pancras station in London. When it pulls into the platform the station manager jumps into their carriage and tells them to wait. She says there are many journalists waiting on the concourse, more than eighty, maybe a hundred.

  The manager asks them to follow her. She leads them through passport control and customs. As they approach the open doors to the concourse Alex can see people lining the staircase, the buzz from the media throng is palpable. A press officer skips ahead and peers around the corner. There’s a bank of cameras there, more than anybody imagined. The press officer walks back to the five activists and asks them to pause for a second.

  ‘There are loads of journalists there. Shitloads. Are you ready?’

  But before any of them can answer, Anthony has pushed past and the others are following him. They walk through the doors, the flashlights explode and their loved ones surge from the crowd with open arms.

  At the station in St Petersburg, Sini and Kruso are climbing onto a train. Sini’s journey home will be short, just three hours, while Kruso is going overland back to Switzerland. The media interest in Sini is huge, a scrum of journalists is expected in Helsinki, some are planning to board the train as soon as it’s on Finnish soil. Kruso’s never been comfortable with the media so he’s booked a seat a few carriages down from her.

  As the train pulls out of St Petersburg, Sini feels an odd sense of deflation. She stares out of the window, confused, searching her body for the euphoria she was expecting. Even when she presents her passport to the Russian border guards and they stamp it without a second look, she feels nothing. They cross the frontier. She’s in Finland now. Russia is behind her and Sini thinks, okay, this should feel like something, but it doesn’t.

  I still don’t feel anything.

  She needs to be with Kruso. She needs to be with him and she doesn’t care about anything else. Her thoughts right now are impossible to make sense of alone, without the others she was jailed with. She can’t feel it without Kruso.

  Sini gets up and walks down the train, pushing through doors and passing through successive carriages, until eventually she finds him. He’s sitting alone, staring at the passing countryside. She falls into the seat next to him and throws her arms around him and holds him as tightly as she can, just like she did when they were surrounded by soldiers on the deck of that Russian coastguard ship, one hundred and one days ago.

  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:

  Walked Nell to school today. Felt very good to fulfil that walk that I’d thought so much about in Murmansk. Walking Joe was on Tuesday and I took the long path back from Finchley Road to West Hampstead alongside the train tracks. For some reason I’d wanted to do that too. I was listening to the explorer Ray Mears on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs. He mentions the driving force and reason why some survive for many days in the face of disaster. It’s loved ones. Prison is not the perilous jungles of the outback but the isolation drove me to yearn and hope to be back with Nell, Joe + Nina.