On a Friday afternoon in Jakarta, 400 activists in crimson robes lay motionless on the concrete outside the ministry of energy. They were pretending to be dead. Around them, on three continents, hundreds of thousands of people were doing something else — walking, chanting, carrying signs, handing petitions to people behind embassy doors. The tenth global “Fridays for Future” climate strike on 25 March 2022 had a new demand spliced into the old ones: stop buying Russian energy. Stop funding the war.
This was the single most important fact of the day. Not the size of the crowds, not the number of cities — though both were large. The shift was in the message. For years, the movement had demanded faster emissions cuts. Now it demanded an immediate halt to Russian energy purchases, explicitly because those purchases finance the invasion of Ukraine. Organisers said that every euro of oil or gas money sent east buys shells that fall on Kharkiv. That is a direct claim. It links a consumer’s gas bill to a specific artillery round. The movement made that link central.
Berlin saw the largest single crowd. An estimated 25,000 people walked the two kilometres from the Bundestag to the Brandenburg Gate along Straße des 17. Juni. Many carried Ukrainian flags. Some had painted the words “Oil = Blood” on them. Fridays for Future Germany said 280 towns across the country registered parallel marches. It was the biggest showing since coronavirus curbs began. A Russian citizen, Arshak Makichyan, took the Berlin stage by video link. He has picketed Moscow’s Pushkin Square every Friday since 2019. He told the crowd: “Everything we had is collapsing. The rouble is gone, we cannot…” The report cuts him off there, but the point lands. He spoke despite new Russian laws that penalise any criticism of the armed forces. He spoke at risk.
In Paris, police closed the Boulevard Saint-Michel for two hours. About 1,200 marchers moved from the Panthéon to the Bastille. Rome bounced a giant inflatable globe above the Via del Corso. North America had smaller gatherings — a student walk-out in Portland, Oregon, and a rally outside the Canadian parliament. Police recorded no arrests across the entire day. They logged scores of petitions handed to parliaments and embassies.
The climate movement has always been global. This was the first time it explicitly tied itself to a specific war and a specific energy transaction. The demand was not abstract. It was not “stop burning things.” It was “stop buying Russian gas and oil, right now, because that money is being turned into weapons.” That is a concrete, traceable claim. Whether it is accurate or not is a separate question. But it is what the protesters said. It is what organisers put into their talking points. It is what the signs said.
Turnout was estimated at several hundred thousand. That is a wide bracket. The movement has seen bigger days. But the context matters. This was a Friday in late March 2022. The invasion of Ukraine had been running for exactly one month. Russian forces were shelling Kharkiv. The rouble had collapsed. Makichyan, on the video link, said everything was collapsing. The protesters in Berlin, Paris, Jakarta, Rome, Portland and Ottawa were saying the same thing in a different way. They were saying the collapse is connected. The oil and gas money is the wire that runs from a heating bill in Berlin to a shell crater in Kharkiv. They wanted that wire cut.
