Russian Icebreaker Catches Fire in St. Petersburg Port: Video

A fire broke out on the Russian icebreaker ship Yermak at a port in St. Petersburg on Thursday, officials said.

Andrey Litovka, head of the press service of the city's Ministry of Emergency Situations, said "garbage" caught fire on the lower deck of the icebreaker, which is currently being dismantled.

"At the pier there is a diesel-electric icebreaker Yermak, which is being scrapped, there is a fire on the lower deck—garbage is burning in a room covering an area of 20 square meters," he said in a video posted on the department's Telegram channel. "I remind you that this icebreaker is being scrapped."

The department was alerted to the fire at 11:23 a.m. local time, St. Petersburg publication Fontanka reported.

There have been a string of mysterious fires in Russia since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

A video circulating on social media showed smoke engulfing the vessel. It's unclear if there were any casualties as a result of the blaze. The Ministry of Emergency Situations said 12 units of equipment and 46 people are working on extinguishing the fire.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's defense ministry for comment by email.

A local public prosecutor's office said that it had launched an investigation into the cause of the blaze.

"The North-Western Transport Prosecutor's Office is checking the implementation of fire safety legislation following a fire on the unused icebreaker Yermak in the large port of St. Petersburg," it said on its Telegram channel.

Molfar, an open-source intelligence agency, found that record number of industrial fires engulfed Russia in the past year.

There were 939 fires in Russia in 2023, compared to 416 in 2022, it found, also noting that there was also a 24.5 percent increase in fires in 2022—the year the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began—compared to 2021.

A map created for Newsweek by Molfar showed that from January 1, 2022, to December 31, 2023, the largest number of fires occurred in the region of Moscow (156), with other notable regions including Leningrad (78), Sverdlovsk (53), Rostov (44), and Nizhny Novgorod (37).

Although Leningrad changed its name back to St. Petersburg in 1991, the region, or oblast, around the city retained its Soviet-era name.

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