 Now possessing the largest whaling fleet in the world, the Soviets could truly claim to be one of the world’s great whaling nations at this point.In the first years of their operations, this new fleet mostly concentrated in the Southwest Pacific sector of the Antarctic and focused primarily on humpback whales, with the "Slava" and "Sovetskaya Ukraina" fleets alone taking 25,000 humpbacks in Antarctic waters during 1959–60 and 1960–61.The "Yuriy Dolgorukiy" and "Sovetskaya Rossiya" fleets, while not nearly catching as much in subsequent seasons due to depletions caused by the first two fleets, did nevertheless “finish the job” by killing some 3,500 and 1,700 humpbacks in their first seasons, respectively.