Those losses may count as victories at sea; the bill is being paid beneath it.
Fishers and poachers along the Black Sea coast often find suffocated dolphins tangled in their nets. They cut off the animals' fins to free them and drop the bodies back into the water. The carcasses, marked by net lines, frequently wash ashore. According to an Al Jazeera report, the war has killed "hundreds times more" bottlenose dolphins, short-beaked dolphins and harbour porpoises than the fishing trade ever did.
Ivan Rusev, head researcher at the Tuzly Lagoons national park in southern Ukraine, told the outlet that some 50,000 dolphins died in 2022 alone. By 2026, he said, the figure had passed 120,000, or roughly one in four cetaceans in the Black Sea. The cause is cumulative. Explosions, cruise missile launches from warships and military sonar confuse the animals and damage their echolocation, the sense they rely on to navigate, communicate and hunt. Dolphins that cannot fish lose weight quickly, then burn blubber already loaded with pollutants from wastewater, agricultural runoff, microplastics and antibiotics. The resulting immune damage leaves them vulnerable to lethal respiratory infections caused by morbillivirus.
The wider ecosystem is under parallel strain. Chemicals from munitions and spills of oil, fuel and vegetable oils from dozens of sunk or damaged warships, tankers and freighters have entered the sea. The 2023 destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro released most of its 18 cubic kilometres of water, contaminated with fertiliser runoff, heavy metals and machine oil. Species such as mullet and bluefish have become scarce, and naval mines have been sighted near Istanbul. Because dolphins sit at the top of the food chain, Rusev noted, everything from zooplankton to fish reaches them.
Conservationists in Bulgaria, Romania and Turkiye have also reported a spike in dolphin deaths, though the cause cannot always be established. Dimitar Popov of Green Balkans, Bulgaria's oldest nature conservation group, told Al Jazeera that most stranded cetaceans are in an advanced state of decomposition, making net marks and other injuries almost impossible to detect. He agreed that warship and submarine sonar affects the animals' hearing and echolocation. Russian environmental monitors, for their part, blamed the deaths on "parasites" and "virus infections" without further explanation.
The report also describes effects on birds. Rusev said explosions and the sound of drones startle migrants moving between Northern Europe and the Middle East, and that flamingoes which had recently begun nesting in his park are abandoning their eggs, which seagulls then eat. The one gain for wildlife, he said, is that boar, roe deer, foxes, jackals, hares and badgers have increased because hunting and poaching nearly stopped. Recovery will be uneven: insects and small mammals should return within years, while Rusev estimates that renewing the cetacean population would take 30 to 50 years.
Much of the casualty data rests on the estimates of a single researcher and cannot be independently verified, and the precise contribution of sonar, munitions and pollution to individual deaths remains contested. What the report makes clear is that the military picture and the ecological one are diverging. Ukrainian sea and airborne drones have sunk two submarines and three dozen Russian warships since 2022, including the Black Sea Fleet's flagship, the Moskva. Those losses may count as victories at sea; the bill is being paid beneath it.
