Russia Opens Piracy Case Against Greenpeace Arctic Activists

MURMANSK/MOSCOW, September 24 (RIA Novosti) – Russian officials opened a criminal case for piracy Tuesday against Greenpeace environmental activists who protested at a Gazprom offshore oil platform in the Arctic last week.

Russia’s Investigative Committee spokesman, Vladimir Markin, said that the environmental organization’s protest constituted piracy and told RIA Novosti that “all perpetrators of the attack on the platform would be held liable, regardless of their nationality.”

The Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise was seized by Russian border guards in international waters last Thursday, a day after the guards detained two Greenpeace activists – Finnish and Swiss nationals – for scaling the Prirazlomnaya oil rig in the Pechora Sea to protest Arctic oil drilling.

Greenpeace immediately struck back against the news of the piracy case, calling it absurd and contradictory to Russian law.

“Article 227 of the Criminal Code on Piracy has three qualifying features: the capture of a vessel with the use of violence, for the purpose of appropriating someone else’s property,” Mikhail Kreindlin, a Greenpeace Russia campaigner and expert on environmental law, told RIA Novosti. He said that in this case, none of those three conditions were met, adding that Greenpeace is a non-violent organization.

Greenpeace said that the protest was peaceful and that its activists were unarmed, adding that the border patrol had seized the Arctic Sunrise at gunpoint. Russia's Federal Security Service reported that the border guards had fired warning shots to force the Arctic Sunrise to stop, but that the ship's captain had refused to obey the warning.

Border guards detained the Arctic Sunrise and have been towing the ship, with a crew of about 30 Greenpeace activists on board, toward the Russian port city of Murmansk for the last four days. Markin said investigators had already arrived in Murmansk and would “question all those involved in the incident, and detain the most active among them.” Greenpeace representatives wrote on the ship’s Twitter feed that the Arctic Sunrise is at anchor in Mishukovo, a village near Murmansk, and that diplomats will be allowed on board the ship at 3 p.m. local time.

The activists on board are believed to include six Britons, an American and at least two people from New Zealand, as well as the Finnish and Swiss nationals earlier detained for scaling the rig.