FATHER-of-three Phil Ball spent more than two months in a Russian jail after armed commandos stormed the Greenpeace ship he was travelling on.

The environmental activist and freelance cameraman was worlds away from his comfortable Oxfordshire home but within four months he was back in the frontline again.

The story of Mr Ball and the 29 other campaigners on board Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise when it was seized by Russian officers in September 2013 is being told in a new book called Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg.

The 44-year-old from Milton-under-Wychwood joined the Greenpeace campaign to protest against oil drilling in the Arctic.

He told the Oxford Mail he has learned a lot from reading the new book by Greenpeace’s head of media Ben Stewart.

Mr Ball said: “When you go through something like that you see it from your own point of view but just the other side of the concrete block wall is someone else going through a similar but different experience, so hearing the other stories from the other perspectives was fascinating.”

The book explores the friendships Mr Ball and fellow campaigners struck up with their Russian cell mates and their battle to outwit the prison guards.

Mr Ball hid dramatic footage he captured of the Russian agents landing on the ship in his shoes for a month before getting it smuggled out of prison and broadcast to the world.

He said: “I certainly remember knowing it was going to be dramatic and was going to have an impact.”

Mr Ball hid the memory card containing the footage in a matchbox and gave it to someone to take out of the prison and send to Greenpeace.

The striking footage was broadcast on news bulletins around the world the following day.

He said: “It was a massive relief and it was like a big weight lifted off my head.”

Mr Ball spent 67 days in a Russian prison facing charges of hooliganism and said it was more of a mental than physical strain, especially with the language barrier.

He was also missing his family: “Another extra stress to the whole thing was that it wasn’t just me going through it but this was an experience other people were going through and I wasn’t there to reassure them and tell them I was going to be OK.”

Mr Ball was limited to a 15-minute phone call home every two weeks, but was also able to keep in touch with letters smuggled into prison. He was finally reunited with his partner and two sons, aged 10 and eight, and four-year-old daughter in late December.

However, by May 2014 he was back at work with Greenpeace, disrupting the first shipment of oil from the Arctic to Europe in Rotterdam.

He is currently working for Greenpeace on another campaign around the UK.

Mr Ball said: “It’s something I get involved with because climate change is something I feel very strongly about.

“It’s a great threat to our planet and a great threat to human beings and I’m not going to put my feet up and ignore it.”

  • Don’t Fear, Don’t Trust, Don’t Beg: The extraordinary story of the Arctic 30 by Ben Stewart and published by The New Press is available now.