A NEWPORT Greenpeace activist jailed for two months in Russia was released yesterday – but said he’d go through his experience all again.

Anthony Perrett, 32, still faces up to 15 years in prison with serious charges of piracy and hooliganism hanging over him, and for the moment cannot leave St Petersburg.

He was the first Briton among the so-called Arctic 30 of activists and journalists on the Arctic Sunrise ship, who were detained by Russian authorities in September after a protest at an oil rig, to be released

Mr Perrett, a tree-surgeon who once served as a Caldicot town councillor, was released this morning after a court in St Petersburg granted him bail earlier this week.

He was asked by journalists if he would do it again. “Absolutely,” he replied.

“We’ve got to take a holistic view of the problem. The problem is that climate change is very serious. The weather is getting much worse. If we don’t act very soon then it’s going to get far worse.”

Mr Perrett said: “It’s good to be out. I don’t look on it as a massive victory. The mission we were here to do was to save the Arctic. We’re no closer to that.”

He said he hadn’t had a phone call for the whole of his stay and that the low point of his detention came when he heard authorities were applying to keep him behind bars for another three months.

Mr Perrett had been imprisoned initially in the Arctic town of Murmansk but was later moved to the infamous Kresty prison in St Petersburg, where he said conditions improved.

“But walls are walls,” he said. “Prisons are the same all over the world. Conditions weren’t bad. The staff have been nothing but professional. It’s very difficult to communicate when you have no Russian.”

He said he had gotten on very well with his Russian inmates. “Not everyone behind these bars is all that guilty. Certainly in the British penitentiary system they certainly wouldn’t be there."

He said finding good food was difficult with being a vegetarian not a common occurrence in Russia.

But he said he had been “well supplied” by his colleagues in Greenpeace “which has been a godsend”, but he had lost weight originally.

“I don’t eat fish. So the fish soup on a daily basis didn’t go down too well,” he said.

He later told BBC Wales: “Like any Welshman being out of Wales isn’t all that much fun for an extended period. I certainly hope to be back in Wales before too long."