1\ Storytime: "I suppose it all started with the snow..." Here's me, second from left at, the Russian Embassy, Ottawa, December 2013. On the eve of historic events in #Ukraine I'm reminded of this moment from my own activist history. ⛄️☮️ 
2\ For me at least, the new cold war started when Russia arrested 30 #Greenpeace activists and boarded the organization's ship 'The Arctic Sunrise' in September 2013 during an #arctic #oil protest. nytimes.com/2013/09/21/wor…
3\ I worked at Greenpeace in Toronto as a fundraiser and had been (like a nerd) up all night watching GP ships on twitter/ship tracker (really). Suddenly, The Arctic Sunrise posted video of VDV with silenced VSS rifles rapelling from Mi-8s to the deck.
4\ The office the next day was pandemonium, real tense atmosphere, many closed door meetings. Canvassers talked about the situation. I was a smoker at the time and stepped out. Some manner of very sophisticated looking helicopter was hovering low over the office. True story.🕵️🚁
5\ It's an advocacy organization, so I think the preference at Greenpeace is to advocate their way out of problems when possible. What followed was a frantic 3 month international protest campaign to have our people released. cp24.com/news/greenpeac…
6\ I spent most of the fall/winter of 2013 helping to participate in and stage various actions and activities to apply pressure to the Russian government to get our activists released. Here's some volunteer canvassers at X University getting the word out.
7\ Here's me "in jail" outside the Russian consulate in Toronto in November, 2013. I might not look it in the photo but I was freezing during this action, even with a merino layer. Putting the cold in cold war, to be sure.
8\ In early Dec 2013, some folks spent weeks assembling large "light brigade" style (obligatory Crimea joke here) LED letters for the embassy action. Van rentals were confirmed and lodging was booked at the Ottawa Best-Western in Bells Corners/Kanata. overpasslightbrigade.org/how-to/
9\ The plan was to build a 30 snow-person "protest" complete with oreo cookie eyes and carrot noses, in front of the embassy. It was freezing cold in Ottawa, nearly -30 with windchill. No joy on snowballs. We tried (and failed) to roll snow late into the night before the action.
10\ Practicing in the hotel parking lot until the wee hours, we figured out we could carve snow-blocks from the huge piles of compacted snow left by ploughs, and shaped them with our hands into round snow balls perfect for making snow-people with. ⛄️❄️
11\ The next morning we drove our vans across the street to the General Dynamics parking lot (Yes, that General Dynamics) and pilfered their snow, which was I guess, -objectively better- than the snow in the hotel parking lot. techinsights.com
12\ At one point, a 'Karen'-type, blonde, short, in her 50s, came out of the Techinsights building on a smoke break and saw what we were doing. "You have to take THIS snow?" she demurred. "There's snow everywhere, and you have to take THIS snow?" It seemed accusatory.
13\ We did take THAT snow. And with an RCMP/Ottawa Police escort, delivered it to the doorstep of the Russian Embassy who were "nonplussed" to see us. You could say they gave us a FROSTY reception. 🙃
14\ Security boxed in our first van with diplomatic cars and called police. Our second van parked around the corner. Using toboggans the coordinator had the foresight to source, we pulled 30 snow-people's worth of boulders and LED letters down the street to the embassy fence.
15\ Police arrived, mediated, and in the end-- we had to settle for taking our group photo across the street, abandoning the snow people to the gulag, and without hanging our letters on the fence (a goal). Something about "no plan survives first contact with the enemy."
16\ After the action, (17 December) we headed back to Toronto hoping that we'd made a difference, and that we'd caused enough of a stir at the Embassy to produce pressure resulting in the release of the activists.
17\ 17 December, 2013 was also the day Putin and Yanukovych signed the Euro-bond agreement. I wasn't really paying attention, but we knew the Russians had bigger fish to fry than 30 hippies, what with the intensifying Maidan protests. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17_Decemb…
18\ 6 days later, on the eve of western Christmas, Putin's government astonishingly dropped all charges and released the Greenpeace activists, allowing them to return home to their families as we'd been asking. bbc.com/news/world-eur…
19\ I took it as a grand gesture at the time, but in hindsight, the release of the activists was overshadowed when a month later, Maidan errupted into violence and pro-Russia forces (and undercover soldiers) began occupying strategic sites around Ukraine. nytimes.com/2014/03/17/wor…
20\ I don't think any of us knew it at the time, but that serious-yet-approachable Russia from pre-2014 disappeared somewhere during our protests. By February 2014 the lines of a new cold war had hardened. 🇷🇺🌍🇺🇸 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Co…
21\ Anyway, there's no specific takeaway here, if you're still reading. Jail solidarity, always. If you protest at embassies expect a security response. If you have to take snow, take it from the parking lots of the military industrial complex (just for laughs).🤗
22\ It was a more innocent time I think, in a lot of ways, at least for the western left. There was no weird #campist discourse, no western left-wing sympathizers with the Russian Federation intimating this was some weird plot by "imperialists".🪆🙄
23\ Everyone involved seriously cared about the climate, the Arctic and the activists. Environmental issues are universal ones. It doesn't matter how your politics cut, either you're for unrestricted drilling in the Arctic, or you're against it. To me, it sounds like a bad idea.
24\ I'm not so sure those unifying principles survived the first 7 years of a cold war, and, as it heats up, I don't know where our increasingly fractious disagreements are going to take us next, but I'll bet it's further apart. The poles shift and shooting starts.
25\ Tonight, I'm thinking about that time 30 snow people pilfered from General Dynamics, stood up to Putin and the Russian Federation-- and in their own small way, helped make the world a better place. We need some of that energy now if we want 'cooler' heads to prevail.⛄️⛄️⛄️
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