Russian Amnesty Now Includes Greenpeace Case MOSCOW - A sweeping amnesty that is underway in Russia was extended on Tuesday to a member of the crew of the Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace International ship seized on the open seas three months ago. If the amnesty covers the rest of the crew as expected, it will draw to a close one of the more contentious chapters in Greenpeace's history, in which Russian commandos boarded a ship, imprisoned the crew members and charged them, for a time, with piracy. The Russians later amended the charges against the 28 crew members, and two freelance journalists on board, with hooliganism, a lesser offense that qualified them for amnesty. Two members of the punk protest band Pussy Riot charged under the same law have gone free. A separate presidential pardon released Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a long-imprisoned business executive who once was Russia's wealthiest man. Neither the members of Pussy Riot nor Mr. Khodorkovsky emerged from the penal colony system, once known as the gulag, showing signs of gratitude, or even contrition. One member of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, stepped out of the penitentiary to say she would have preferred to stay than to accept an amnesty from President Vladimir V. Putin. The amnesty, she said, had been intended only to bolster the image of Mr. Putin and Russia before the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, which start in February. Guards ejected her from the prison, she said. The one Greenpeace activist granted amnesty so far, Anthony Perrett, a Welsh crew member, who had faced up to seven years in prison on the hooliganism charge, also struck a defiant note in a statement released through Greenpeace. Unlike the Russian dissident figures, however, he directed it not at Russian authorities but rather the big oil companies that, he said, had been the organization's target all along. "It's time to go home, it's time to go back to Wales," Mr. Perrett said. He described what he called an unjust imprisonment and said, "This is not over yet." "The Arctic is melting before our eyes and yet the oil companies are lining up to profit from its destruction," he said. This is why I took action, to expose them and mobilize people to demand Arctic protection. I am proud of what I did. Greenpeace International sent the ship to the Pechora Sea to draw attention to the potential environmental threats caused by a rush to exploit natural resources in the Arctic. The activists wanted to hang banners on a drilling platform operated by Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant. Greenpeace said its action had never been directed at the Russian state. For Greenpeace, what ensued though was the worst crisis since the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in a New Zealand harbor in 1985. One crew member was killed in that attack. Peter Willcox, the captain of the Arctic Sunrise, had also captained the Rainbow Warrior. Had the Greenpeace activists, members of Pussy Riot and Mr. Khodorkovsky not been released, there was little doubt that Western governments and rights groups would have used the Olympic Games as an opportunity to draw attention to the plight of such high-profile prisoners. The Greenpeace activists, though, had been released on bail pending trial; for them, the amnesty closed their case before it went to court, and will allow non-Russian crewmembers to leave the country. Greenpeace lawyers say they hope to have them out of Russia before New Year's Eve.