The key facts

  • The tugboat spent at least half an hour trying to break through the ice in the Amur backwater in Khabarovsk and stopped
  • Navigation in the Amur basin has already ended, and the fleet is being placed into winter layup and repair
  • Local residents reported that the day before, tugboats had been pushing a crane

Tugboat stuck in the ice

A tugboat failed to break through the ice crust and got stuck in the Amur backwater near the Brosko Mall shopping center in Khabarovsk. A local resident filmed the incident, and it was published by the Telegram channel “Mestopro_khv”. According to the author of the video, the tugboat spent at least half an hour trying to break through the ice, but failed and stopped. Local residents reported that the day before, tugboats had been pushing a crane, and one of them was unable to get through the ice in the morning.

Context: navigation has ended

The incident occurred against the backdrop of officially completed navigation: two days earlier, the Federal State Budgetary Institution “Amurvodput Administration” announced that navigation on the inland waterways of the Amur basin had ended, and that in the backwaters and on shore sites in Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the fleet was being placed into winter layup and repair. Thus, vessel traffic during this period has already been wound down, and the tugboat, apparently, was performing the final work before being laid up — an editorial interpretation based on the coincidence of the timing of these two reports.

Other tugboat incidents

In the same article, Gazeta.Ru recalled two other recent events involving tugboats, unrelated to the Khabarovsk incident: a tugboat sank off the coast of Romania while ferrying another vessel toward Turkey, and in Serbia, a tugboat from the early 20th century was found at the bottom of a silted-up river .