Russian officials said Monday they will work towards freeing all orca and beluga whales from a notorious facility in the east of the country, after a visit by US-based marine mammal advocates. Nearly 100 whales captured for sale to aquariums have been kept in small pens for months in what the media has nicknamed a “whale jail” in the Russian Far East, as the campaign to release them gathered strength and went global. Kremlin-backed Far Eastern governor Oleg Kozhemyako on Monday announced that he has “made a decision to free the animals into the wild,” after meeting noted environmentalists and campaigners Jean-Michel Cousteau and Charles Vinick who visited the facility last week.
