Swedish intelligence reports that the Red Army would violate the Yalta agreement and advance from Germany to Denmark were what had prompted Operation Eclipse. Capture of Denmark would have given the Soviet Union a postwar port free of the ice that blocked its own port of Murmansk several months each year. By establishing Allied control of Kiel and of the German scientific bases between that city and the Danish border, Hibbert's force forestalled such a Russian move. It also denied the Russians the city of Kiel and its warm water port situated on the shore of the Baltic, as well as its access to the North Sea via the Kiel Canal.