On thin ice: Putin vs.Greenpeace

In the cold autumn of 2013, a Greenpeace team set out on a mission to highlight the dangers of oil drilling in the Arctic. This mission was to be a turning point for the environmental movement, but not in the way they had planned: their actions were met with a brutal response from the Russian authorities.

Watching the footage from that day (taken home on a memory card hidden in an
activist’s shoe), it is hard to believe that all those guns and helicopters were there to stop a peaceful protest against climate change. The disproportionate response is a powerful reminder of why these protests matter: polluters see Greenpeace and its supporters as a real threat to their profits.

This group of Greenpeace activists and journalists became known as the Arctic 30, and their story is told in the BBC series On Thin Ice: Putin versus Greenpeace.