Russian whale wasn’t spying

A suspected “spy” whale that died off Norway this year escaped from a Russian naval base, a scientist said. The beluga, nicknamed “Hvaldimir” — a portmanteau of “Vladimir,” as in Putin, and the Norwegian for “whale” — was widely assumed to be a Russian spy after it was first spotted in 2019 wearing a harness saying “Equipment St Petersburg.”

But a whale researcher, citing her former contacts in Russia, told the BBC that the beluga wasn’t a spy, but a trained whale called Andruha who went missing from a military program after it began working in the open waters: He was “smart [but]... kind of like a hooligan,” she said, “and went where he wanted to.” Its death appears to have been natural.