TODAY: Russia stakes its Arctic territory as Greenpeace activists complain of harsh conditions; Tolokonnikova resumes hunger strike; Sochi worker claims unpaid wages; nationalist protest in St. Petersburg, Moscow police to facilitate volunteer patrol for illegal migrants; Katyn case goes to EU court; “Russia’s Murdochs”; oil giants sign accord.

Alexandra Harris, the British Greenpeace activist currently detained with 29 others in Murmansk, has written about the harsh conditions she and her fellow inmates face in jail.  The head of Greenpeace in the UK says Russia’s actions, including the current treatment of the activists who say their rights are being denied, are a clear signal that it has little tolerance for interference in what it sees as its interests in the Arctic.  Greenpeace says its premises in Murmansk were broken into, and a cage that was to be used in a protest against the detention of the 30 activists was stolen.  Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova will be transferred to a new facility, supposedly for her ‘personal safety’, as she renewed her hunger strike.  Fellow band member Maria Alyokhina, in solidarity with Tolokonnikova, has withdrawn her request for a more lenient sentence, saying she does not have the ‘moral right’ to continue: ‘If the Russian authorities are willing to grant me an early release, let them make it under a broad amnesty, along with other convicted women who have small children.’  A construction worker at the Olympic site in Sochi has sewn his mouth shut in protest over two months of unpaid wages.  More than 20 people were detained in St. Petersburg yesterday following a sanctioned nationalist demonstration against crimes committed by foreign migrants.  Moscow police are to set up a volunteer militia to crack down on illegal migrants, planning street probes once a week.