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

Author:Ben Stewart [Stewart, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Arctic Regions
ISBN: 9781620971109
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23258896
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2015-05-04T23:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

The appeals go on, the process grinds forward, always with a sense of impending, inevitable rejection. But the Kremlin does not only have the thirty in its sights.

Mads Christensen has sources telling him an FSB raid on the Greenpeace office in Moscow is a real possibility. Bank accounts will be shut down. Staff will be arrested and charged with complicity in the action. Any doubts about the veracity of the information fall away when the rental contract on the Russian office is cancelled with just three weeks’ notice. It’s a typical tactic familiar to Russian opposition groups. A decision is taken to start pulling out the foreign staff in Russia, even Daniel Simons, who’s leading the legal response team in Murmansk.

In Moscow, on the balcony outside the Dance Hall, the head of Greenpeace Russia, Sergey Tsyplenkov, tells Laura Kenyon – a Canadian campaigner – what the sources are saying. The Investigative Committee is compiling a list of people it will potentially be investigating, and he assumes her name is on it. It’s too risky for her to stay here. As a foreigner she’s exposed. It’s time to go.

Simons and Kenyon leave Russia. Everybody else waits for the Kremlin to make its move.

The following day nothing happens, but rumours of an assault on the Moscow office are swirling like confetti. Now sources inside the Russian government are warning that the crackdown is imminent, that the office will soon be shut down and staff arrested. Instead of bringing this saga to a close, it seems there is an appetite in the Kremlin to escalate.

Late in the afternoon Mads Christensen taps the microphone on the video link between London and Copenhagen. He asks Ben Ayliffe and the head of the media team to get on a secure line.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘we’ve got a source, a really good one, someone who knows what’s happening at the top level. I don’t want to say who this is, and you don’t need to know, but they’re telling us it’s going to happen. Maybe as soon as tomorrow. Office shut down, bank account closed, staff picked up by the FSB. We need to do something. Something that makes them stop and think. We need to make some kind of intervention so the PR hit they think they’ll take – inside and outside Russia – makes the FSB think again.’

Ben Ayliffe and his colleague lock themselves in a room with a bag of pastries and a pot of coffee and thrash through ideas. Ayliffe leads the team organising demonstrations, vigils and petitions around the world. He’s a twelve-year Greenpeace veteran with a passion for cricket, bird watching and shutting down polluting infrastructure using peaceful direct action. It should have been him on that ship but he hurt his back and Dima took his place.

Just over an hour later they have something for Christensen. It’s a draft of a letter to Putin from Kumi Naidoo. Not much in itself, but this letter has a twist. It includes a serious offer by Naidoo to swap places with the Arctic 30.

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