Spotted in satellite imagery, dolphins trained for military duties have been placed by the Russian Navy in the main port of Sevastopol in Crimea.
A decidedly unusual weapon that Russia chose for use in Crimea: in the main port of the city of Sevastopol, discovered by examining satellite images taken by the American company Maxar Technologies, there would be at least two fences for “War Dolphins“, Placed by the Russian Navy to defend a naval base in the Black Sea. These dolphins were transferred there in February, around the time Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine real-time tracking Submarine Threat: According to analysis by the United States Naval Institute (USNI), many of the Russian ships anchored in the area would be potentially vulnerable to submarine attacks even if they are out of missile range.
The “soldier dolphins” deployed by Putin in Crimea.
Moscow’s use of “soldier dolphins” is not entirely new: previously, some satellite images from 2018 had shown the presence of military dolphins at the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria, during the civil war. Namely, it is known that related to the use of sea creatures to perform tasks such as detecting mines, protecting ships and ports, and repelling underwater enemies Russia has a tradition in education of dolphins for military use, as well as Ukraine, which in the past trained some of these mammals at an aquarium near Sevastopol, as part of a program that grew out of a Soviet-era program that was abandoned and then revived in the 1990s was 2012.
Two of the specimens trained by the Ukrainians, but fell into Russian hands after the 2014 invasion of Crimea, would have allowed for the expansion of the Moscow program, which two years later bought another five for use in the region. However, it is not clear if the dolphins found in Sevastopol today are the same ones that were recruited back then.
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As for the technology used to use these animals in military operations, in parallel with the training program, “Russian specialists have developed new devices that convert target detection from the dolphin’s underwater sonar in a signal to the operator’s monitor – a source told the Russian News Agency. The Ukrainian Navy lacked the funds for this know-how and because of this it had to suspend some projects”.
In the event of an attack, the system would therefore make it possible to pick up the signal sent by the dolphins and by them directly into a warning message in the control system, making the use of these mammals useful for tracking any type of submarine incursion. Dolphins, on the other hand, may not be the only sea creatures being trained by the Russian military. A beluga whale spotted off Norway in 2019 is also believed to have been trained by the Russian Navy.