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'Russian Spy' Whale Found Dead in Norway

Hvaldimir first appeared off Norway's coast in 2019. Jorgen REE WIIG / NTB Scanpix/AFP/File
Hvaldimir first appeared off Norway's coast in 2019. Jorgen REE WIIG / NTB Scanpix/AFP/File
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'Russian Spy' Whale Found Dead in Norway

Hvaldimir first appeared off Norway's coast in 2019. Jorgen REE WIIG / NTB Scanpix/AFP/File
Hvaldimir first appeared off Norway's coast in 2019. Jorgen REE WIIG / NTB Scanpix/AFP/File

A Beluga whale whose strange harness sparked suspicions it was trained by Russia for spying purposes has been found dead in Norway, according to an NGO which tracks his movements.
Nicknamed "Hvaldimir" in a pun on the Norwegian word for whale, hval, and its purported ties to Moscow, the beluga first appeared off the coast in Norway's far-northern Finnmark region in 2019, AFP said.
At the time, Norwegian marine biologists removed an attached man-made harness with a mount suited for an action camera and the words "Equipment St. Petersburg" printed on the plastic clasps.
Norwegian officials said Hvaldimir may have escaped an enclosure and may have been trained by the Russian navy as he appeared to be accustomed to humans.
Moscow has never issued any official reaction to speculation that he could be a "Russian spy".
On Saturday, the beluga's lifeless body was discovered off the southwest coast at Risavika by Marine Mind, an organization that has tracked his movements for years.
"I found Hvaldi dead when I was scouting for him yesterday like usual," Marine Mind's founder Sebastian Strand told AFP.
"We had confirmation of him being alive little more than 24 hours before finding him floating motionlessly," he added.
Fredrik Skarbovik, maritime coordinator at the port of Stavanger, confirmed the beluga's death to the VG tabloid newspaper.
Strand said the cause of the whale's demise was unknown and no visible injuries were found during an initial inspection of Hvaldimir's body.
"We've managed to retrieve his remains and put him in a cooled area, in preparation for a necropsy by the veterinary institute that can help determine what really happened to him," Strand added.
With an estimated age of around 14 or 15, Hvaldimir was relatively young for a Beluga whale, which can live to between 40 and 60 years of age.
Beluga whales can reach a size of six meters (20 feet) and generally tend to inhabit the icy waters around Greenland, northern Norway and Russia.
Those include the Barents Sea, a geopolitically important area where Western and Russian submarine movements are monitored.
It is also the gateway to the Northern Route that shortens maritime journeys between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

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Russia’s Putin Says His Young Family Members Speak Fluent Mandarin Chinese 

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
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Russia’s Putin Says His Young Family Members Speak Fluent Mandarin Chinese 

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that young members of his family speak fluent Mandarin, though he told school children they should not forget the importance of English too despite the growing popularity of Chinese.

Putin has two daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila and they speak Russian, English, German, and French. Putin, who divorced his wife in 2014, rarely speaks about his family but has at least three grandchildren, according to Russian media.

"Some of my family members, the little ones, speak Chinese too - they speak it fluently," Putin told pupils of Secondary School No. 20 in Kyzyl, Tuva, about 4,500 km (2,800 miles) east of Moscow.

Amid a growing partnership between China and Russia, Mandarin has been growing in popularity across Russia as a foreign language of choice, a trend Putin said was due to developing contacts across economics, politics and society.

Putin, who speaks fluent German but has also taken lessons to improve his English, said that pupils should not forget the importance of English.

"English is a great language, it has given humanity a great deal in terms of combining knowledge and uniting people in the field of culture, and so on," Putin said.

Russian, English, Tatar, German and Chechen are the most widely spoken languages in Russia, according to the 2022 census. While Mandarin is spoken far less, it has been growing swiftly in popularity in recent years as a foreign language.

Putin and China's President Xi Jinping in May pledged a "new era" of partnership between the two most powerful rivals of the United States, which they cast as an aggressive Cold War hegemon sowing chaos across the world.

China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.

English is the world's most spoken language with about 1.5 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese with about 1.1 billion speakers, and then Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu, according to Ethnologue, a language research center.