Beloved whale suspected of spying for Russia was shot to death, activists say

Hvaldimir, suspected of being a Russian spy whale, spent five years schmoozing Norway’s coastal communities, charming the locals with his toothy grin and seemingly insatiable appetite for attention. But two animal activist groups this week said that someone fatally shot him and left his bullet-riddled body floating in coastal waters.

The beluga whale’s corpse was found on Saturday afternoon in Norway’s Risavika Bay near Stavanger.

OneWhale, a nonprofit specifically founded to protect Hvaldimir, and NOAH, a Norwegian animal rights group, said this week that they had filed a police report with local law enforcement and the state authorities charged with investigating environmental crimes. While Hvaldimir’s necropsy won’t be done for several weeks, the groups said they wanted to release his likely cause of death to combat claims that have appeared in the days since his body was found, including that seabirds could have caused the injuries that killed him.

Regina Haug, OneWhale’s founder, who said she saw blood pouring out of the holes in Hvaldimir’s body and a bullet stuck in another, scoffed at that idea.

“Unless those seabirds were carrying shotguns,” she told The Washington Post. “It was immediately clear that someone had shot him. You could see a bullet sticking out of his body.”

The Post did not independently verify Haug’s claims. The Southwestern Police District did not immediately respond to The Post but confirmed to CNN that it had received a request to investigate Hvaldimir’s death, although investigators have not yet determined whether it will open a formal inquiry.

“I don’t think we’ve had a case like this before,” said Southwestern Police District Superintendent Victor Fenne-Jensen, who declined to comment on whether his department had investigated rumors that the whale was a Russian spy.

He told CNN that Hvaldimir was “kind of a celebrity.”

In 2019, the beluga captured global attention when he approached Norwegian fishermen while strapped in a harness that read “Equipment St. Petersburg,” creating suspicions that he was an intelligence asset. Locals nicknamed him Hvaldimir, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of the Norwegian word for whale, “hval,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first name.

Haug said she started OneWhale in 2019 when she went to shoot a short film about the whale and heard some people talking about making him an attraction at a theme park. Hailing from California, she assumed a Norwegian nonprofit would put a stop to something like that, but when she looked online, she found no such organization.

So she started her own, which has grown over the past five years. In 2021, the group went to the hardware store, bought neon vests and launched Team Hvaldimir, which sought to manage crowds where he happened to show up on a given day and educate spectators on do’s and don’ts of interacting with a wild creature. In the early days, they started with the basics.

“We stood there and said, ‘Don’t poke a whale with a stick,’” Haug said.

More recently, they were pushing to move Hvaldimir away from Norway’s southern waters, where he was in constant danger of being injured. Haug said that she once heard Norwegians predicting that Hvaldimir, despite charming locals and people around the world, wouldn’t last long surrounded by humans whose livelihood depended on the sea.

“If he didn’t get hit by a propeller, he would get hit by a bullet,” Haug remembered them saying. “He was a nuisance, and that’s how nuisance animals are dealt with in Norway.”

In June, after a years-long effort, OneWhale and NOAH secured a government permit to transport Hvaldimir to the relative safety of Norway’s northern coast, where he would be less likely to encounter humans or their boats. They had hired Keith Yip, a marine mammal expert who in June rescued two beluga whales from an aquarium in the war-torn region of Kharkiv in Ukraine, and were coordinating with the shipping company DHL, which flew eight manatees from Ohio to Florida last year.

At first, the organizations planned to move Hvaldimir on Sept. 10, but an objection to their plan would have meant delaying the operation until after the departure of humpbacks, which populate those waters from summer to fall. Haug and company wanted him to commune with other humpbacks and decided to push the operation until July of next year.

Veterinarian Siri Martinsen, a spokeswoman at NOAH who called Hvaldimir’s death “alarming” and “shocking,” said the groups filed the report to put pressure on police in a country where wildlife crimes are almost never solved. She said the animal activists wanted to get the attention of possible witnesses while their memories are fresh, rather than waiting for the completion of the necropsy in two to three weeks when events might have faded.

“It is crucial that the police are involved quickly,” she added.

Haug said she loved Hvaldimir, whom she described as highly intelligent and loving, like a person. Authorities need to catch whoever killed him as a deterrent to anyone considering something similar in the future, she added.

“I can’t accept the fact that someone wanted to hurt him,” Haug said, choking up. “To look at his face and shoot at him is just as cruel as a person could be.”