MOSCOW, September 20 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Russian border guards said Friday that they were towing a seized Greenpeace icebreaker from the Arctic Pechora Sea to the port of Murmansk, where it will be investigated for its alleged attack on a Gazprom oil rig.
The Arctic Sunrise icebreaker “is being towed because the captain refused to steer it,” a spokeswoman for the Murmansk Region branch of the border guard service told RIA Novosti. The ship is expected to arrive in Murmansk by Monday or Tuesday, she said.
The trip to Murmansk is required because border guard ships in the Pechora Sea have no investigators qualified to give a legal assessment of Greenpeace’s actions, the spokeswoman said.
Two activists who had traveled to the Gazprom oil rig aboard the Arctic Sunrise were detained by border guards on Wednesday for trying to climb up the facility. A day later, border guards stormed the ship and took control of it, Greenpeace said, adding that the seizure was done at gunpoint.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which oversees the border guards, said in a statement on its website that the activists attempted to “hijack” the rig and that the Arctic Sunrise repeatedly ignored demands to cease “unlawful activity,” which prompted Russian authorities to stop the vessel.
The FSB did not say what charges the Greenpeace crew could face in Murmansk. The FSB statement was dated Wednesday, but described the ship’s seizure, which Greenpeace said took place on Thursday.
The Federal Security Service also denied the use of weapons during the seizure, other than for warning shots, despite Greenpeace’s claims that the border guards threatened the crew with firearms. Photos taken from the deck of the Arctic Sunrise and made public by Greenpeace showed balaclava-wearing border guards approaching the ship with Kalashnikov rifles, handguns and knives.
A representative of the environmental group said earlier that the crew had been accused of terrorism, violating the three-mile off-limits zone around the oil rig and conducting “unlawful scientific activity,” but those claims were never officially confirmed.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday harshly criticized the activists’ actions as having “the appearance of extremist activity.” The ministry noted that the ship had been sailing under a Dutch flag, and that a letter of concern had been handed to the Dutch ambassador in Russia.
It remained unclear whether there were legitimate legal grounds for the ship’s takeover. Greenpeace said the incident was in international waters and could amount to maritime piracy, an allegation that remained pending a comment from the Federal Security Service as of this article’s publication.
However, the use of force by state authorities in international waters is not unprecedented per se, especially if it happens within a country’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, like in the case of Arctic Sunrise, Mikhail Voitenko, editor-in-chief of the Maritime Bulletin maritime news website, told RIA Novosti on Friday.
He cited as examples the Chinese freighter New Star, sunk by Russian border guards in 2009, or last Monday’s seizure of the refrigerated cargo ship Stina, managed by a Swedish company, which was reportedly detained by the French Navy in the Caribbean on allegations of transporting cocaine.
Greenpeace Russia said on Twitter that its lawyers were preparing legal action in response to the seizure. The group compared the ship’s takeover to the 1985 sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship by French secret services.
© Photo Greenpeace Russia
A Greenpeace picket outside the Moscow office of Gazprom
Last year, six activists lead by Greenpeace head Kumi Naidoo crippled the operations of the same Gazprom rig for 15 hours by scaling it and remaining suspended in hard-to-reach areas. The activists eventually left without facing any charges.
The Arctic Sunrise reached waters off the northern coast of Russia last month and soon ran into trouble with Russian authorities when it was formally banned from sailing in the Northern Sea Route. The ship ignored the ban, which Greenpeace called unlawful.
Greenpeace on Friday also reported staging pickets outside Russian embassies in 30 countries, including Australia, Britain, Finland, Japan, New Zealand and Sweden, as well as the Moscow office of Gazprom, which has not commented on the situation.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic because they say that it is currently impossible to sufficiently clean up potential oil spills in the region, and that such drilling cannot be economically viable without state subsidies.
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