Russian leader Vladimir Putin has deployed his combat dolphins closer to the war frontline following fears that Ukraine could take back Crimea, according to new satellite images.
The images revealed that the highly trained mammals seemed to have moved from the harbour entrance in Sevastopol to Novoozerne, 56 miles to the north in the Black Sea. According to the pictures, dolphin sea pens have been detected near where Volodymyr Zelensky's special forces have made incursions. The anti-sabotage dolphins are taught to target enemy divers that are creeping into harbours to set up limpet mines or for reconnaissance. The mammals are trained to signal their human controllers or carry out lethal strikes with underwater guns.
Novoozerne is a former Soviet submarine base where Russia has deployed missile corvettes, landing craft and some support vessels including a submarine support ship, says OSINT researcher H I Sutton who analysed satellite images to spot the dolphin pens. “The deployment is likely to defend against Ukrainian special forces who present a real threat in the area,” reported the researcher in Naval News. "Trained dolphins are considered effective against military divers. There is no human, however athletic or well-trained, who can out-swim them. And their inbuilt sonar gives them an even greater advantage.”
The mammal move towards the war zone by Vladimir Putin ’s forces comes as the dictator has been forced to shift the bulk of his warships from Sevastopol - headquarters of his Black Sea Fleet - to Novorossiysk due to Ukrainian missile and drone strikes. The bottlenose dolphin squadron was conscripted by Putin when he seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “We had to practically start from scratch to teach the [mammals] to search for objects under the water because the Ukrainian Navy hardly worked with them,” a Russian source said at the time.
However, footage shows how dolphins have been trained to use underwater guns since Soviet times. Retired Captain Yury Plyachenko, a military trainer, explained: “The dolphin should have signalled, and if necessary it was ordered to destroy an underwater saboteur, It was armed with an underwater gun.” A Russian state TV broadcast said: “This is what the underwater gun looked like. It was attached to a dolphin with a special fixture, and a mammal could shoot.”
Rare archive footage showed a dolphin attacking a diver. “The man had no chance in this battle,” viewers were told. “It was next to impossible for a diver to get to ships and stay unnoticed if dolphins were patrolling them.” The military dolphin training programme — long based in Sevastopol — dates back to Cold War era of the 1970s when the Soviet Union utilised the animals to search for mines or spy on foreign ships.
Russia has kept silent about the current role of its naval dolphins and how they have coped with repeated explosions from Ukrainian missiles as well as both aerial and sea drones in Sevastopol. The dolphin deployment to Novoozerne - with Putin putting them in harm’s way - may indicate they are seen as militarily useful. Putin’s forces appear increasingly worried about Ukraine targeting Crimea, and severing supply lines to the peninsula, as a prelude to recapturing the territory. Or the dolphin move could suggest desperation from the Russians and landed on the Crimean peninsula.