The Kremlin hopes that the killer whales that are currently being held in a so-called whale jail in the Russian Far Eastern Primorsky Territory will be released soon, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th February, 2019) The Kremlin hopes that the killer whales that are currently being held in a so-called whale jail in the Russian Far Eastern Primorsky Territory will be released soon, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
Greenpeace's Russian office told Sputnik in October 2018 that preparations to sell 13 killer whales which are on the Red List of Threatened Species to China were underway in Russia. At least 11 of these orcas have been held in cramped enclosures in Primorsky Territory's Srednyaya Bay. As many as 90 white whales that were also caught illegally are reportedly being held there as well.
"The president [of Russia, Vladimir Putin] has made a relevant order, and we hope that ... the problem around the killer whales will be resolved in a very short time and that they will be released," Peskov told reporters.
He specified that funds from the Russian Federal budget were not currently being spent on holding the sea animals.
"There are certain companies, certain entities that were catching these animals in order to sell them," Peskov specified.
In late January, a court in the Primorsky Territory's city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk received a case brought up by a group of local public organizations against the Russian Agriculture Ministry, Russian fishery agency Rosrybolovstvo and Russian environmental authority Rosprirodnadzor. The plaintiffs are calling on these bodies to release the killer whales from the Srednyaya Bay along with the white whales that are also being kept there.
Putin has tasked Russian prosecutors to continue checking whether laws related to catching and protecting marine mammals were being respected, including in Srednyaya Bay, which environmental activists often call a "whale prison."
