Ukraine claims its dolphin army died after refusing Russian takeover

A top Ukrainian official has claimed that the dolphins trained by its military for sea missions have most likely died as they refused food from their new Russian handlers.

The Ukrainian military had been training dolphins since 2012. As Russia took control of Crimea in 2014, among other assets, Ukraine also lost the facility of training sea mammals for military purposes. The repeated calls by Ukraine to Russia for the return of the animals has fallen on deaf ears.

Now an envoy of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he was informed that the dolphins are dead and they have finally lost hopes of seeing them again.

“There is a very sad story related to the dolphins,” Borys Babin, Poroshenko’s permanent representative in Crimea, told Ukrainian news site Obozrevatel.

He claimed that the dolphins did not take to their new masters. “The dolphins, trained by the [Ukrainian] naval forces in Sevastopol, would communicate with their trainers through special whistles,” Babin said.

“The Russians obtained these whistles and the rest of the special equipment belonging to the military unit but the trained animals refused not only to cooperate with the Russian trainers, but [also] refused food and subsequently died.”

Many countries around the world train sea animals to recover objects at sea and detect mines and other naval hazards, as well as alert officers and help in rescuing people overboard. The US has one such facility in San Diego.

When Russia annexed Crimea, it gave an option to the Ukrainian military personnel stationed in the region to either defect to Russia or face deportation. Many picked the former. Babin contrasted the defection to dolphins' sacrifice.

“It is very sad that so many Ukrainian soldiers, deployed to Crimea in 2014, treated matters of defection and loyalty to the flag much more poorly than these dolphins did,” Babin added.

Russian officials, however, denied that dolphin’s death has anything to do with they refusing to take food from Russian handlers.

“There can be no talk about any Ukrainian patriotism with regards to the combat dolphins because precisely under Ukraine the special forces dolphins… were involved entirely in commercial activities, not underwater operations,” Dmitry Belik, a Russian representative in Sevastopol, told state news agency RIA Novosti. He added that old age and sales of the animals in the past were to blame for their death.