A polar bear who wandered 700km from its natural habitat in Russia's far-east has been flown home.

The exhausted-looking animal reportedly travelled on an ice floe from the remote, sparsely populated Chukotka to a village on Kamchatka, about 700 kilometres (434 miles) south.

Russian emergency authorities mounted an operation to return the bear.

A member of the response team shot a tranquillizer at the bear and put it in a container and onto a helicopter which flew to the snow-covered Chukotka.

The bear was then released into the wild.

Environmentalists say that wild animals such as polar bear are suffering from the shrinking hunting environment and the receding ice as the Arctic is getting warmer.