"Almost half of the icebreaking carriers serving the Yamal LNG this week traverse the most difficult part of Russia’s Northern Sea"

They still have a couple weeks before ships leaving Yamal start running into ice but the operators want to get out as much LNG as they can before that happens.
Those super-reinforced Arc-7 class gas carriers that Novatek has been buying can get through a couple metres of ice without icebreaker escort but it's slower, more expensive and a lot of banging around for the crews.

Here's the current situation for thickness and volume (thickness x extent) compared to a post we did last October 18:

and last year (both maps from the Danish Meteorological Institute):

Danish Meteorological Institute

Two things to note: 1) the extent on the Russian side of the basin is much lower and that's the sort of stuff the media focus on but more troubling is 2) the ice at the top of Greenland and across the Canadian islands should be much thicker. Temperatures north of 80° north latitude are now solidly below freezing but need to drop another 6°C to get down to the 1958 - 2002 average and get that ice forming fast.
But enough with cryology, on to moving stuff around on big boats.
From the Barents Observer:

As ice shrinks to year’s low, a powerful fleet of tankers sail Arctic route to Asia

At least six top ice class Arc7 tankers were the last days of September and early October sailing on the eastern part of the Northern Sea Route.

It is the most complicated part of the Arctic shipping route. Normally, ice lies thick in the area until late July and the waters again start to freeze in early October.

Judging from information from the Northern Sea Route Administration, the «Vladimir Vize» and «Georgy Ushakov» were on their way to or from ports in Korea, while the «Nikolay Urvantsev», «Fedor Litke», «Vladimir Rusanov» and «Vladimir Voronin» had course to and from China.

That constitutes almost half of the current fleet of icebreaking tankers serving the Yamal LNG project. A total of 13 carriers have been built for the project and the remaining two will start shuttling to the remote Russian Arctic coast in the course of the year.

Destination Asia
The carriers are built for the Yamal LNG, the project operated by Russian natural gas company Novatek, and all shuttle to the terminal of Sabetta.  Never before have so many of them been in the eastern part of the Northern Sea Route.

The shipments are part of a growing Russian export of LNG to the Asian-Pacific region.
According to Novatek, about 25 percent of all its Yamal LNG was in the 3rd quarter of the year exported to Asian buyers. And a total of 15 shiploads were in the same period sent eastwards to the region via the Northern Sea Route....

....MUCH MORE