The beluga Hvaldimir acquitted

The mystery of why a Russian beluga whale, which appeared years ago off the coast of Norway, was dressed in a harness and called a “spy”, may have finally been solved, the BBC reported.

A marine expert believes that the animal did escape from a Russian military base, but it is unlikely to have been a spy.

The tame beluga first made headlines in 2019 when it approached fishermen off Norway’s northern coast wearing a harness, sparking speculation that it was an escaped Russian “spy whale”.

According to the account of one of the fishermen at the time, the animal began to rub against their boat. He said he had heard of animals in distress that instinctively knew they needed help from humans and thought it was “one smart whale”.

Fishermen help the beluga free from the harness, after which it swims to the nearby port of Hammerfest, where it lives for several months.

Local residents call the animal Hvaldimir – a combination of the Norwegian word for whale – hval – and the Russian name Vladimir, BTA adds.

Seemingly unable to catch live fish to eat, the beluga charmed visitors by poking at their cameras and even in one case returned a cell phone.

Fascinated by the story of the whale, Norway is taking steps to have it watched and fed.

Now Dr. Olga Shpak, an expert on the species, says she believes the whale was indeed owned by the military and escaped from a naval base in the Arctic Circle. However, she does not believe that the beluga was a spy.

Shpak believes that she was trained to guard the base and escaped because she was a “bully”.

Russia has always refused to confirm or deny that the whale was trained by its military.

But Dr Shpak, who worked in Russia researching marine mammals from the 1990s until returning to her native Ukraine in 2022, told BBC News: “For me it’s 100 per cent (certainly )”.

Olga Shpak, whose account is based on conversations with friends and former colleagues in Russia, features in the BBC documentary Secrets of the Spy Whale, which is now on BBC iPlayer and was broadcast on BBC Two.

Dr. Shpak does not want to name her sources in Russia for their own safety, but says she was told that when the beluga surfaced in Norway, the Russian marine mammal community immediately identified it as one of theirs. Then, along the chain of vets and trainers, it was reported about the absence of an animal named Andrukha.

According to Dr. Shpak, Andrukha/Hvaldimir was first captured in 2013 in the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East. A year later, he was transferred from a facility owned by a dolphinarium in St. Petersburg to the military program in the Russian Arctic, where his trainers and vets kept in touch.

“I think when they started working in open water, trusting this animal (not to swim away), it just gave up on them,” she says.

Shpak learned from her sources that Andrukha was smart, so he was a good choice for training. At the same time, the whale was something of a “hooligan” – an active beluga, so they were not surprised that he refused to follow the boat and went where he wanted.

Satellite images from the Murmansk region in the Russian Arctic show whales that appear to be belugas in enclosures near a naval base.

“The location of the whales very close to submarines and surface ships may suggest that they are actually part of a security system,” said Thomas Nielsen of the Norwegian online newspaper The Barents Observer.

Unfortunately, the amazing story of Hvaldimir/Andruha does not have a happy ending. After learning to feed on its own, it spent several years traveling south along the coast of Norway, and in May 2023 was even spotted off the coast of Sweden.

Then on September 1, 2024, his body was found floating in the sea near the town of Risavika, on the southwest coast of Norway.

Although some activist groups have suggested that the whale was shot, this explanation has been rejected by Norwegian police. She reported that there was nothing to suggest that human activity was the cause of the beluga’s death. The autopsy found that Hvaldimir/Andrukha died after a stick was stuck in his mouth.

Illustrative Photo by Diego F. Parra: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-beluga-whale-swimming-underwater-24243994/