I have wondered too, about the ship captain and crew. Didn’t they know the ice conditions were so dangerous? Did they blindly sail into an ice field? Were they in open water, but then, ice built up with a change in the weather, which caught them flat footed???? Some details have not been reported about how they got trapped by ice.
The wind can shifts the ice floes rapidly. Last I checked the Chinese ice breaker was also stuck. The Australian ice breaker couldn’t get her loose because the ice was too thick.
Take a basin of water and throw some rose petals on top of the water. Put a fan at one end and watch all of the rose petals pile up on the other end. The same thing happens to polar ice during the summer when the ice is melting and cracking up. It moves during the winter too, but much less so and primarily due to ocean currents, not the wind.
According to Anthony Watts over at WWUT, they did not have a very good weather forecasting capability on board. Anthony and the Weather Channel have been asked to provide them with some wind forecasts so that they can predict when they might expect to get loose. The Captain certainly could have used that kind of info going in.