MOSCOW The crew of a ship sailing to Russia's far north to save hundreds of thousands of starving seals may soon be ready to start moving them to an area where they can find food, Reuters reported the ship's owners as saying on Friday.

Sergei Kiselyov, director of the Murmansk Shipping Company, said the Kola and her 20 crew had left the Arctic port city on Thursday and were nearing the remote White Sea area where the hungry young seals were stuck on ice floes.

"We would like to collect them all but in reality we will get there and see what's going on," Kiselyov told NTV national television. "If there are five here and five there, with a day's sailing in between, then there will be nothing we can do."

The rescuers plan to load the seals onto the ship from ice floes in the White Sea and release them into the neighboring Barents Sea, where food is more plentiful.

The seals are usually born in the White Sea and the ice carries them northward into the bigger Barents Sea to grow to maturity. Strong winds this year have kept the floes jammed in the White Sea, where about half the 300,000-400,000 pups could slowly die of starvation, scientists say.

A similar catastrophe in the White Sea in 1966 killed about 300,000 seals, about half of that year's newborn pups.

Kiselyov told Interfax news agency the operation could take up to two weeks and cost the shipping firm $100,000, but he insisted that he felt duty bound to help the young seals.

"The Arctic is where we work and we feel responsible for it. We, as sailors, always go to help those who need it and this time it is the seals," he said. "It is our duty to look after the environment and help nature deal with extreme situations."

Every year, Russia kills tens of thousands of Greenland seals in the White Sea for their fur and oils.

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