Translated material
Drama in the Laptev Sea
When the Alexey Kulakovsky approached the fishermen in distress, the navigation lights on the tugboat, according to the fishermen, went out, and then it tilted heavily to the left side and sank. The disaster occurred just 20 miles from the Yakut port of Tiksi. There were 14 crew members on board the lost tug. A few hours after the shipwreck, a helicopter discovered an inflatable life raft on which the captain and two sailors were, and the frozen sailors were lifted aboard the Lenaneft-2064 tanker. Later, two more life rafts were found in the area where the tug was lost, but there were no people on them, and one raft was half-opened, the other did not open at all. The bodies of five sailors were discovered from a helicopter and lifted from the water, the fate of another six is unknown. Yesterday, the search and rescue operation was still ongoing, it involved three Mi-8 helicopters with rescuers and doctors, the tanker Lenaneft-2064, the icebreaker Captain Borodkin and the hydrographic vessel Nikolai Evgenov were searching in the area of the shipwreck. The search for the missing sailors was made difficult by the storm, and the water temperature, which is only plus four degrees, gives virtually no chance of saving living people. The investigation opened a criminal case under Part 3 of Art. 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of traffic safety rules and operation of maritime transport, resulting in the death of two or more persons through negligence). A large linear tugboat of the river-sea class with a reinforced ice hull, Aleksey Kulakovsky, was built in 1992 and belonged to the Lena United River Shipping Company OJSC. The length of the vessel is 49.6 m, width 10.2 m, speed 12 knots, displacement 801 tons, two 515 kW engines were installed on the vessel.
The President of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) Boris Egorov, in connection with the death of the crew members of the tugboat "Alexei Kulakovsky", by decree declared August 31 a day of mourning in the republic. “The sailors fulfilled their civic duty during the rescue operation to assist a ship in distress and gave their lives in the name of saving people in trouble,” says the decree of the President of Yakutia.