They thought they were mounting a low-key protest against Russian oil – until balaclava-clad soldiers took them prisoner. The Arctic 30 talk about the guns, the alcohol theft … and how Paul McCartney got involved
The sun had barely risen on 18 September 2013 when Sini Saarela started to worry she might drown. The climate activist was trying to occupy Prirazlomnaya – a bright red oil platform in Russia’s Pechora Sea – and things were getting tough. Workers were using water cannon to stop her and colleague Marco Weber climbing up, crushing them under a relentless torrent of freezing cold water. He was showing signs of hypothermia.
“That was a frightening experience,” Saarela says today, on a video call from her home in Finland. It certainly looks that way in new BBC documentary On Thin Ice: Putin vs Greenpeace. The addictive six-part series tells the inside story of the Arctic 30, a group of Greenpeace activists who set out to halt work at the first offshore oil rig in the Russian Arctic, and ended up pawns in Vladimir Putin’s power struggle with the west. Edited 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 off the edge of Prirazlomnaya, when the show kicks into gear.