After successful completion of work on ensuring ice navigation in the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea on the most important routes, the icebreaker Vladivostok of FSUE “Rosmorport” promptly, "in one breath", made transition from the seaport of the Big Port St. Petersburg to the area of the Franz Josef Land archipelago and in the beginning of April provided icebreaking assistance for a cargo ship and the delivery of cargo to create an airfield in the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the interests of the Military Construction Complex of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Rosmorport says in a press release.
Despite the structural peculiarity of the assisted vessel, which has a bow bulb, and heavy Arctic ice – the thickness of the ice reached 2 meters – the icebreaker helped the ship to reach the place of unloading safely, which confirms the icebreaker's ability to carry out icebreaking operations in difficult Arctic ice conditions with skillful control by the captain and crew of the vessel.
Immediately after the successful operation in the Franz Josef Land archipelago, the Vladivostok icebreaker headed for the area of the Guba Belushya Bay of the Southern Novaya Zemlya archipelago, where he took a caravan of ships under icebreaking, having previously laid an ice channel in difficult constrained conditions of the bay relief. During the interval between unloading of vessels in Belushya Guba, the icebreaker managed to provide icebreaking assistance and anchoring for the scientific expeditionary vessel Mikhail Somov"in the Matochkin Shar Strait for unloading.
The icebreaker Vladivostok will continue to deliver cargo to Franz Josef Land archipelago until the end of May.
Vladivostok is an 18 MW diesel-electric icebreaker and the lead vessel of the 21900M project. The icebreaker was built in Russia at the Vyborg Shipyard.