Briton takes on Putin over oil pipeline

The promises of Vladimir Putin to Chinese leaders in Beijing last week flowed as thick and fast as the oil he wants to deliver to them. There were agreements on aerospace and gas exploration, plans for joint refineries and warm pledges of a “strategic partnership” in world affairs.

Yet, even as the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, declared that the Russian President’s visit “took neighbourly friendship between China and Russia to a new high,” one Englishwoman was preparing to thwart him.

Standing between Mr Putin and his ambition to build a 2,000-mile pipeline to pump Siberian crude oil to energy-hungry markets in China and Japan is a 59-year-old expatriate who is helping to orchestrate opposition to the project on environmental grounds.

Jennie Sutton, a retired teacher who has lived in Siberia for more than 30 years, has endured the unwelcome attentions of the FSB, the Russian internal security service, in addition to mysterious burglaries and the theft of her car, because of her campaigning. She has been named as a spy in local newspapers and accused of undermining the regional economy.

Telegraph