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A Vladivostok photographer, through the lens of her camera, has documented the horrific phenomenon of North Korean fishing vessels found off the coast of Russia’s Primorsky Krai.
This abandoned North Korean fishing vessel sailed off the east coast of Russia in the spring of 2020. It is one of the few such flooded vessels – most of which have tragic histories – to land off the coast of Russia each year.
Since 2019, photographer Natalya Bulkina, based in Vladivostok in the Far East in Russia, has photographed North Korean ghost ships.
Most of the ships that roam the Russian shores are empty, but some of them carry the bodies of North Korean sailors or storm survivors who often hit the Sea of Japan. Most survivors are malnourished.
In 2018, locals brought an excavator, in an attempt to be able to penetrate a flooded boat, which had stuck in the sand of a beach about 150 kilometers away from Vladivostok, after hearing noises coming from inside the ship. A Korean-speaking “skinny, red-eyed” fisherman then emerged from the boat.
Fishermen who survive and reach Russia are deported back to North Korea.
Bulkina, who moved to Vladivostok from her hometown near St. Petersburg, told Radio Free Europe that after visiting the coastline and seeing some North Korean ships, she realized that these flooded ships “were not a case of isolated, but were part of a larger phenomenon ”.
A knife believed to have come through North Korean ships off the Russian coast.
According to the Siberian Times, squid hunters from North Korea often sail in Russian waters and use illegal fishing nets, usually during the summer months.
A 2020 study concluded that massive fleets of Chinese squid fishermen have drastically depleted their seafood stocks in North Korean waters in recent years. Having quotas to meet, North Korean fishermen are being forced to make increasingly long and dangerous voyages at sea with their wooden boats.
The number of deaths at sea by the authoritarian North Korean state is impossible to verify. Russia has no statistics on ships wandering along its coast, but Japanese authorities have reported nearly 600 ghost ships off the coast of Japan between 2016 and 2020, with dozens of bodies found aboard them.
Details of a sunken North Korean ship off the coast of Russia.
Bulkina said the dire state of North Korean fishing vessels she has seen makes her frustrated with the “hopeless courage” of people to sail in the open ocean with such vessels.
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Bulkina said there has been a drastic drop in the number of capsized ships coming out of the Russian east coast. This photographer has doubts that this is more likely to be related to isolation measures than to the improvement of safety conditions for fishermen by the totalitarian state.
Bulkina told local media that photographing ghost boats gives her a “strong sense of despair, courage, danger and fear”, and said staying close to these boats made her think about the drama of these people entering the sea. with such weak ships ”. / REL
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