Satellite tv for pc images present Russia has positioned educated dolphins on the entrance to a key Black Sea port, in a transfer that could be designed to assist defend a big Kremlin naval base there, based on a naval analyst.
Washington
Russia is using dolphins to protect Black Sea naval base, satellite photos suggest
H I Sutton, a submarine analyst who first reported on the dolphins for the U.S. Naval Institute on Wednesday, mentioned the pens have been moved there in February, across the time of the invasion of Ukraine.
He mentioned the dolphins may very well be used to counter specialist Ukrainian divers trying to enter the port to sabotage Russian warships — a task he mentioned america and Russia have beforehand educated marine mammals for.
In an e-mail to The Submit, a spokesman for Maxar Applied sciences agreed with Sutton’s evaluation and rationalization of the dolphin pens captured by their satellites lately.
Some Russian warships are based mostly on the Sevastopol port, out of vary of Ukrainian missiles. The warship Moskva — the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet — sank this month after being hit by two Ukrainian missiles, delivering a big blow to Russian naval capability, U.S. and Ukrainian officers mentioned.
For the reason that Nineteen Sixties, the U.S. Navy has educated dolphins and sea lions to assist guard in opposition to underwater threats. In accordance with marine consultants, dolphins have probably the most subtle sonar identified to science, making it comparatively simple for them to detect mines and different probably harmful objects on the ocean flooring which are arduous to detect utilizing digital sonar.
The U.S. Navy marine mammal coaching program, based mostly out of San Diego, was declassified within the Nineteen Nineties. That made it simpler for officers to counter persistent claims by animal rights activists that the mammals have been used as offensive weapons — a fable popularized by the 1973 science-fiction movie “The Day of the Dolphin” wherein a scientist trains dolphins to speak with people. Within the movie, the dolphins have been kidnapped in an try to make use of them as a part of a political assassination plot.
Russia reportedly used the Sevastopol base through the Soviet period to coach dolphins for navy functions similar to planting explosives on ships or looking for mines. Whether or not they have been ever deployed for navy operations is disputed. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Sevastopol facility was utilized by Ukraine to coach dolphins for remedy periods. Russia resumed the coaching of navy sea mammals after taking management of the port metropolis in 2014, the Moscow Occasions reported on the time.
In 2019, a white whale surfaced in Norway sporting a harness — prompting native marine consultants to invest that they’d come throughout a mammal that was a part of a Russian naval coaching program, based on media reviews. The whale was dubbed “Hvaldimir” by locals — a mix of the Norwegian phrase for whale, and the primary title of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Paulina Villegas contributed to this report.