Alleged Russian Spy Whale Spotted Off Swedish Coast

News Desk

Sweden: A white beluga whale spotted off the coast of Sweden is believed to have been trained as a spy by the Russian Navy.

One Whale Marine Biologist Sebastian Strand said that the whale appeared last Sunday in the waters of the Hannebostr and area off the southwest coast of Sweden.

The whale was first spotted off Norway’s coast in 2019 wearing a Russian harness. The tame beluga whale first approached Norwegian boats near the island of Ingoya four years ago. The island is 415 kilometres (258 miles) from Murmansk, where Russia’s Northern Fleet is based.

One Whale is the organisation that tracks whales.

“We don’t know why she’s moving so far away from her natural environment now; maybe hormones are driving her to find a mate because she’s 13 to 14 years old,” Sebastian Strand stated.

Another possible factor is because is she feels lonely as belugas are a very social species; it could be that he’s searching for other beluga whales, Marine Biologist added.

Beluga whales tend to live in icy Arctic waters around Greenland, Russia, Alaska, and northern Norway, and some migrate during the summer. The closest beluga population is located on Svalbard Island in the far north of Norway, named Hvaldemir in Norway.

When it first appeared in the Norwegian Arctic, marine biologists from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries removed the equipment around its body, including a camera and the words ‘Equipment St. Petersburg’ bearing the inscription on plastic clips.

The whale has since come to be known locally as Hvaldimir, after the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia, for its part, has never officially addressed the claim that Hvaldimir was trained by the Russian army. It has previously denied the existence of any programmes seeking to train sea mammals as spies.