Russia's naval-defense dolphins may have escaped their enclosures following a brutal storm in the Black Sea during the last few days. According to intelligence analyst HI Sutton, satellite imagery reveals that the weather tore apart the dolphin's pens in Sevastopol harbor in occupied Crimea. Whether the dolphins went AWOL is uncertain but seems likely.
From Forbes:
Many of the world's bigger navies train dolphins and whales for special naval tasks: retrieving items from the seafloor, locating mines and defending ships from enemy divers.
The Russian navy's militarized cetaceans include warm-water bottlenose dolphins and cold-water belugas. In 2019, a beluga wearing a harness labeled "Equipment St. Petersburg" appeared in Norwegian waters, far from his species' normal Arctic habitat, after apparently escaping a Russian enclosure[…]
The Russian Black Sea Fleet first deployed bottlenose dolphins in Sevastopol back in 2018, apparently as a defense against Ukrainian saboteurs.
