The Stolen Ukrainian Military Dolphins of the Black Sea
We explore the fascinating history of Ukraine's military dolphin program, and the terrible ecological effects of the Russian invasion on their populations in coastal waters.
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Please note: This report contains graphic imagery of deceased dolphins.
In a country at war, death is all around.
But for Pavel Goldin, he’s focused on a particular kind of collateral damage – an aquatic mammal he’s spent much of his life studying.
“Please report all known finds of dead dolphins!” reads a recurring post on a Facebook page he runs.
After locating a dead dolphin, if the carcass is intact, Pavel performs a necropsy to try to determine the cause of death to learn more about how and why so many of Ukraine’s dolphins are dying.
A scientific study estimated that between 37,500 to 48,000 dolphins in the Black Sea died over a three month period after the full-scale invasion. This terrible figure amounts to around 15 to 20 percent of the total population – a death rate which is ten times higher than before the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022.
“The population can simply not withstand that type of death rate,” explained Naomi Rose, an expert on marine mammals in captivity.
The ecological impact of the war highlights the vulnerability of aquatic animals to the bombings and mines that have become common along the coastal areas of Ukraine.
And, despite the fact that wild dolphins in the Black Sea are on the verge of extinction, new dolphins raised in captivity have also found their way to these waters in a very different capacity: as a weapon in the Russian military’s arsenal.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion Russian forces moved trained dolphins into a harbor at the entrance to Sevastopol in occupied Crimea.
In the summer of 2023, UK’s Ministry of Defense reported that satellite imagery had shown that the number of dolphin pens had almost doubled in the harbor and that more “trained marine mammals” had likely been added to these defenses. There were also reports that Russian had moved other dolphins into another Naval Base northwest of Sevastopol.
The dolphins are likely used to patrol the area looking for Ukrainian divers sent to spy; to protect ships against Ukrainian divers planting mines attached by magnets; or to collect military equipment that has fallen on the seafloor.
However, the fact that Russia has been training dolphins for combat purposes was common knowledge - in fact, the history of training dolphins for military purposes spans back decades.
The first program began in the 1950s as a U.S. Navy research program. Dolphins and beluga whales were held in captivity and studied as a way of researching hydrodynamics – the Navy wanted to learn more about how these animals swim, and potentially use that research to develop new submarine technology.
Although this was unsuccessful, they made other discoveries.
“That’s when they noticed them clicking,” explained Naomi. “The dolphins were using echolocation, and up until the 1950s researchers were unaware of that.”
The Soviet program began a few years after the U.S. program but was also making fascinating discoveries.
“One of the researchers in the Soviet Union discovered…that they [dolphins] sleep with only one half of their brain at a time,” Naomi explains. He noticed that the dolphins would swim very slowly as a pod near the surface of the water with one eye closed and one eye open and that is how they discovered unihemispheric sleep, Naomi continued.
Although these discoveries were significant from a scientific perspective, they didn’t really translate to anything useful for the military in the ways they had intended.
“But, by then, they'd realized how smart they were,” Naomi said.
Pavel explains that the dolphins used in the Navy training programs are predominantly bottlenose dolphins:
“They have long term social ties, kinds of kinships and each group can even have their own cultural traditions.” This level of intellect makes it easier to train the dolphins because they have the cognitive abilities and the communication skills necessary to adapt and build relationships with their human trainers, Pavel explains.
It is precisely the dolphin species' high intellect that makes them so interesting to Pavel:
“It is a really amazing feeling to realize that there are… animal species which can be directly comparable to humans. This is amazing,” he said.
The scientists studying the dolphins started to realize the dolphins could be used in combat, rather than simply as research subjects.
The dolphins were also incredibly good at noticing patterns and patrolling.
“They're trained to alert their trainer whenever they see something that's not supposed to be there…They don't have to be given A or B or C, they can just be told ‘anything’ that's not normal and they'll alert their trainer,” explained Naomi.
It has been rumored that these dolphins were also trained to attack enemy divers – one rumor even goes so far as suggesting that dolphins were being trained by the Ukrainian navy to carry underwater guns capable of shooting knives from their head.
However, Naomi has strong doubts about this: she explains that if a “person is shot and reacts, and blood is in the water…I don't think [the dolphin would] ever do it again…each individual dolphin would do it once and never again because they are very sensitive to distress.”
When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did the training program. The dolphins were transferred over to the Ukrainian navy and were then put in a commercial dolphinarium.
The dolphin trainer, Borin Zhurid, then sold them to Iran because it was too expensive to feed them: "I cannot bear to see my animals starve ... We're out of medicine, which costs thousands of dollars, and have no more fish or food supplements,” Boris reportedly explained.
And so in 2000, 27 animals, among them a beluga, seals, sea lions, walruses and three cormorants, were loaded into an aircraft and transported to the Persian Gulf.
In 2014, Crimea became occupied and the State Oceanarium in Sevastopol was taken over by Russian forces who seized the dolphins and never returned them despite demands from Ukraine.
Yevhen Marchuk, the former Ukrainian defense minister and military general, questioned whether the dolphins would work with Russia:
"Dolphins get used to the people they work with. It's not so easy for them to change allegiance,” Marchuk explained. In 2018, Ukraine’s representative in Crimea, Boris Babin, said that many of these dolphins seized by Russia had died “patriotically” after refusing food from the Russian trainers.
He explained that the dolphins had been trained with whistles and equipment, all of which Russia had received and yet the dolphins still refused to eat.
“It is very sad that many Ukrainian military personnel who were stationed in Crimea in 2014 treated the issue of the oath and allegiance much worse than these dolphins,” Babin said.
For a lot of people, including Pavel, using dolphins in the military is not only unethical but also pointless:
“It is not only inhumane, I am fully convinced this is a crime…Secondly it is totally useless. It is like using elephants for combat in the 21st century. Ukraine uses underwater drones, which are very effective… Russia uses dolphins instead of drones. It is absurd. It is absolutely useless.”
AFTER THE PAYWALL, we talk about the Ukrainian response to Iran’s drone attacks in Israel (using weapons often employed on Ukrainian cities). And, Tim meets with our subscribers in Washington, D.C., which he’s visiting for the first time since last summer.
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