Russia Releases Imprisoned Greenpeace Ship

By The Maritime Executive 06-06-2014 10:44:00

A team of lawyers representing Greenpeace International confirmed that the Russian Investigative Committee (IC) had decided to release the Arctic Sunrise, after nearly nine months of detention in the Arctic port of Murmansk.

The Arctic Sunrise was seized at gunpoint in international waters by Russian commandos last September after a protest at Gazprom's Prirazlomnaya Arctic oil platform in the Pechora Sea. The 28 activists and two freelance journalists onboard were jailed on charges of piracy and then hooliganism, before finally being granted a Parliamentary amnesty at the end of December last year.

The ship, on the other hand, got no such amnesty.

Ben Ayliffe, head of the Arctic oil campaign at Greenpeace UK, said:

“Our first priority is to make sure the Sunrise is seaworthy. Nine months is a long time for an icebreaker to go without basic maintenance, let alone the sort of care and attention she usually gets from her crew.

The Arctic Sunrise should never have been detained in the first place. There was absolutely no justification for her being boarded, seized and kept for so long in Murmansk, not least when the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered her immediate release in November 2013.

This whole affair has been a brazen attempt to intimidate those who believe that drilling for oil in the melting Arctic is reckless and unsafe.”