Ben Stewart - Don't Trust, Don't Fear, Don't Beg

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.

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] http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/7040 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] http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/mikhail_ulyanov/ 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.

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.’