Greenpeace has sent its Arctic Sunrise icebreaker to protest against the pending explorations works by oil companies Rosneft and ExxonMobil in the Arctic.

The environmental campaigners wanted to expose the threat of any oil operations in the pristine area and the inevitable damage to the fragile nature of the region.

The seismic ships sent to map out the oil reservoirs under the seabed use acoustic cannons whose sound is ‘devastatingly high – over 250 decibels which can severely damage the hearing of whales and dolphins’, they claim.

The Russian authorities denied entry to the ship but it still decided to proceed and entered the Kara Sea. But after it spotted the Geolog Dmitri Nalivkin seismic ship, it was approached by a Russian Coastal Guard boat and ordered to leave the area under the threat of fire.

Chechen teenagers hurl eggs at the offices of Beeline and Megafon mobile operators in capital Grozny.

The mob attack took place after the republic’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, condemned the companies for a ‘blatant vote rigging’ during a contest for the top 10 visual symbols of Russia.

He said a lot of text messages that had been sent in favour of the Heart of Chechnya mosque were disregarded due to an alleged ‘overload’ despite the fact that they operators still charged the money.

The operators blamed the technical difficulties on the organizers of the contest. The mosque finished second in the contest, just 400,000 votes behind the Kolomna Kremlin.