On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace – a gripping docuseries on the climate activists’ clash with the Russian leader

Except a Bond movie (with the exception of the most recent one) always has a predictable outcome: 007 foils the bad guy, saves the day and gets the girl.

For the 28 Greenpeace members and two journalists who found themselves banged up in a Murmansk prison in 2013 after attempting to storm a Russian oil platform in the Arctic and halt drilling, there were no such certainties.

Based on past experience, they’d assumed they’d be held for two days at most, then released and booted out of the country. Instead, they were informed that they’d be held on remand for two months while it was decided whether or not they were guilty of piracy, a charge which carried a sentence of up to 15 years.

Even if you know how it all ended, this six-part docuseries, stripped across three nights (Sun-Tue, June 9-11) in double bills, is riveting.

It’s a tale of an oil protest gone badly wrong, and also a lesson in what happens when naive idealism comes crashing up against the paranoia and brutality of Vladimir Putin.

These days, we’re all too familiar with what Putin is capable of. When he first took the reins of power in Russia, though, he was still something of an unknown quantity.

Conservative politician Iain Duncan Smith, a former British prime minister, says Putin represented “the face of a new Russia, a clearheaded leader, open for business”.

“We believed this was a bloke we could do business with,” says Duncan Smith over footage of various Western leaders, including then PM David Cameron, warmly shaking hands with the former KGB thug-turned-tyrant.

That was until the rigged Russian election of 2012, when the real Putin — the short-in-stature macho man who liked to be filmed riding a horse shirtless or clutching a hunting rifle — emerged to crack down on the freedoms Russian citizens had begun to take for granted.

Russia wasn’t the only country eager to drill in the Arctic. Britain and America also wanted a piece of the action, but Russia got there first.

The ‘Arctic 30’, as they were soon tagged, weren’t aware how repressive Putin’s Russia had become by 2013 when they hatched the plan to disrupt operations at the platform operated by the state-owned oil and gas company Gazprom.

It was a brave move but, in hindsight, an impractical one. Setting off from Norway in the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, the plan was for two people to scale the rig on ropes, after which a survival pod with enough supplies to keep the people inside going for a few days would be winched up and left to dangle from the side of the rig.

Greenpeace’s campaign of disruption had had some success in the past, forcing several countries to abandon plans for Arctic drilling, which had been made possible by global warming melting the ice caps. But as the operation’s leader, a Greenpeace veteran called Frank (only first names are used), puts it, the plan “went to shit” almost immediately.

As the two climbers made their way slowly up the rig, they were bombarded with water cannons. There was a very real danger they’d either be blown into the water or drown while hanging from their ropes.

Suddenly, Greenpeace’s small boats came under attack from the Russian “coastguard”, who turned out to be members of the FSB, formerly the KGB. They were armed to the teeth and wearing balaclavas.

The upshot was that the FSB forces returned in a helicopter, abseiled onto the Arctic Sunrise and took over the ship, cutting off communication to the wider world and holding the activists captive.

They had no legal right to do any of this, since the ship was in international waters. But Putin — who was less interested in the oil than in the status it gave him — considered Greenpeace’s “attack” on the rig to be a personal attack on him. “Gazprom is Putin,” says the company’s former comms head Igor, who we learn near the end is now an officer in the Ukrainian army.

The series deftly blends footage secretly filmed by the activists with skilful dramatised recreations to thrilling, chilling effect.