Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in 2013, or the wilder assertions made by the broadcaster Alex Jones (emphatically not the woman from The One Show) meant that two documentaries this week unfolded for me like the twistiest – if not necessarily the most plausible – of thrillers.
Twenty-four per cent of Americans still doubt that the Sandy Hook massacre even happened
Then again, in my slight defence, such ignorance seemed to be what both programmes were assuming – because, unlike many documentaries, they didn’t summarise or give away the story they were about to tell. Instead, they stuck largely to a chronological approach in which each startling new development was allowed to startle us without any advance warning or hype.
About the only foot that On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace put wrong was its weirdly flippant punning title. It opened in September 2013 when 30 Greenpeace campaigners were on the Arctic Sunrise ship preparing for what would prove a foolhardy operation to scale the first oil rig drilling in the Arctic – the foolhardy bit being that the oil rig was Russian.
As the activists acknowledged, they knew the action was illegal, but they were prepared for the 48 hours of detention they thought they might endure as a result. In the event, the Arctic Sunrise was invaded by heavily armed Russian special forces in a helicopter and towed to Murmansk, where all 30 were detained for two months while the authorities prepared charges of piracy, carrying a maximum sentence of 15 years.
At which point, things took a turn for the le Carré. One activist, Phil, had filmed the special forces illegally boarding a ship in international waters and still had the footage on an SD card inside his insole.
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