Russia "Likely" Training Combat Dolphins To "Counter Enemy Divers"

British military spies say Russia appears to be training "combat dolphins" to counter Ukranian soldiers in the annexed Crimean peninsula, CBS News reported on Friday. UK Defense Intelligence said that in the last year, the Russian Navy has made significant investments in security at the Black Sea Fleet's main base at Sevastopol. Read on to find out how militarized dolphins figure in. 

As for the upgraded security, "This includes at least four layers of nets and booms across the harbor entrance. In recent weeks, these defenses have highly likely also been augmented by an increased number of trained marine mammals," the UK defense department said. "Imagery shows a near doubling of floating mammal pens in the harbor which highly likely contain bottle-nosed dolphins."  The dolphins are "likely intended to counter enemy divers," the agency said.

This is no innovation: The Russian Navy has used beluga whales and seals for a number of missions in Arctic waters, the agency said.  In 2019, a beluga whale wearing a harness was found in waters off Norway, and it reappeared off the coast of Sweden last month. There is widespread speculation it was being used for surveillance. Norwegians nicknamed it "Hvaldimir" — a takeoff on the word "whale" in Norwegian (hval) and a its suspected association with Russia, CBS News reported.

Hvaldimir's harness contained a mount suitable for an action camera, and the words "Equipment St. Petersburg" were printed on its plastic clasps, the news outlet reported.  The whale, believed to be 13 or 14 years old, was seen swimming rapidly in May off Sweden's coast. Experts suspect hormones are driving Hvaldimir to find a mate. "Or it could be loneliness as belugas are a very social species," Sebastian Strand, a marine biologist with the OneWhale organization that has tracked Hvaldimir, told AFP in May. "It could be that he's searching for other beluga whales."  

The potential spy recruit isn't as wacky as it seems, CBS explains. Both the Soviet Union and the United States used dolphins during the Cold War, training them to detect submarines, mines, suspicious objects, or people near harbors and ships.  AFP reported that a retired Soviet colonel said Russia even trained dolphins to plant explosive devices on enemy vessels and to detect abandoned torpedoes and sunken ships.

The new analysis follows an April 2022 report by U.S. Naval Institute News that Russia's military is using specially trained dolphins to defend the Crimean naval base. A submarine analyst wrote that satellite imagery showed two dolphin pens at the entrance to Sevastopol's harbor, the Russian navy's "most significant" naval base in the Black Sea. He said the pens were moved there in February, around the time that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NPR News reported.  Dolphins are good underwater soldiers because they are "fast, agile and brilliantly adapted to hunting and killing underwater," Andrew Lambert, a professor of naval history at King's College London, told NPR. "Dolphins would be ideal for killing human divers … fast, clever, and powerful. There is no evidence that they have done this or are trained to do so, but it is probable. Any diver in the harbor at night would be a target."