Satellite Photos Show Crimea Lost Naval Defense Line in Storm

Crimea lost a naval defense line in a storm that battered the annexed Black Sea peninsula over the weekend and into Monday, satellite photos appear to show.

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) analyst MT Anderson shared the satellite photos of a harbor entrance in the port city of Sevastopol on X, formerly Twitter, dated November 28. He said the pens that held Russia’s specially trained dolphins deployed to protect its Black Sea fleet and Crimea are “likely gone.”

Militarized dolphins have been used by the Russian Navy to detect Ukrainian elite special forces divers throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The dolphins are part of a complex multi-layer defense that includes nets, floating barriers, anti-ship missiles, specialist artillery and S-300/S-400 long-range air defenses.

Images published by the British Defense Ministry in June showed that Russia had doubled the number of its marine mammals in Sevastopol.

OSINT and naval analyst H. I. Sutton also assessed late on Tuesday that based on preliminary analysis, “the dolphin pens in Sevastopol harbor are gone as a result.”

He pointed to the satellite photos shared by MT Anderson, and wrote: “Clear image of harbor entrance, no dolphin pen.”

“They may have been sunk or washed away. It is plausible that some or all of the trained dolphins have been freed,” Sutton said in another post on his website, noting that recently it appears that some of the dolphins were deployed to Southern Naval Base which is north of Sevastopol.

“It should be remembered that if the dolphins are indeed free they have been raised in captivity. It can be expected that they were reliant on their human trainers for food and may be unable to fend for themselves. Escape may thus be a death warrant,” he wrote.

“It is possible that the Russian Navy moved the pens in advance of the storm, but there is currently no evidence of this. I am awaiting clearer imagery for further analysis,” Sutton added.

Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry for comment by email.

The storm wreaked havoc on annexed Crimea on Sunday and Monday, with hurricane-force winds and 30-foot waves, leaving at least three people dead on the Russian and Crimean Black Sea coast and half a million people without power.

Ukrainian officials said Monday that Russian coastal defense lines had been destroyed during the storm.

“A storm washed away trenches in occupied Crimea that [the] Russian army dug out on the beaches,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “According to information from Crimean media, in Yevpatoria, the water washed away the defense line on the coast, engineering buildings, and firing positions.”

Russian forces began fortifying the area amid fears of a Ukrainian advance earlier this year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reclaim Crimea , which Russia annexed in 2014.

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