In April 2019, fishermen near Hammerfest, in northern Norway, found something they did not expect: a beluga swimming with a harness tightly fitted around its body, with camera mounts and an inscription that read ‘Equipment St. Petersburg’.
They named her Hvaldimir, a combination of the Norwegian word for whale and the name Vladimir. The theory that the Russian Navy had trained her as a spy made headlines around the world, but once freed from the harness, the whale did something no one expected: she stayed close to humans and became a celebrity in Norway for five years.
On August 31, 2024, a father and his son who were fishing in Risavika Bay, near Stavanger, found her body floating in the water. She was between 14 and 17 years old, very young for a beluga. Animal rights organizations reported that she may have been attacked, but a police autopsy revealed that she had a stick about 35 centimeters long lodged in her mouth. The police said there was no evidence that any human had directly caused her death and ruled out the possibility that she had been killed.
