Recently in Altai, a bear attacked a female tourist, and the woman died as a result of the tragedy. The story dominated media headlines and sparked heated discussion on social media. Why such a strong reaction? The reason is simple — cases like this are extremely rare, which is why any human death resulting from an encounter with a wild predator immediately creates an “information boom.” After the tourist’s death, regional authorities retaliated by sending crowds of hunters into the wilderness, where they shot and killed at least 12 bears.
I have written before in my materials that conflicts will continue to increase. There will be real victims, both among wild animals and among people. And the reasons have long been known: the destruction of wildlife habitat, the decline of the natural food base, and the loss of even the most basic opportunities for animals to survive. Forests have been divided between logging companies and hunting grounds, where trees are cut down and animals are shot “for sport, like living targets.” Let me remind you that one-third of all publicly accessible forest hunting grounds in the country are already in PRIVATE hands, serving an industry of paid killing.
Bears come to people in search of food, and so do other predators. We are seeing growing conflicts involving tigers and wolves, but instead of addressing the real problems, officials are rapidly increasing quotas for killing wild animals. With bears, the situation has effectively been taken to the point of absurdity: every year, we independently maintain a registry of bear extermination, collect official resolutions issued by regional governments across the country, and calculate the number of authorized quotas for killing bears.
For the 2026/2027 season, we expect an extreme anomaly in the numbers. We are already collecting the latest data, and it will be presented soon. This is an enormous and extremely difficult undertaking.
But to understand the scale: in the 2019/2020 season, authorities permitted 24,405 bears to be killed. By 2025/2026, they had authorized the shooting of 45,972 bears. And this is despite the fact that in 2018, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Prosecutor General’s Office reported the mass destruction of bears and even urged the government to place them under urgent federal protection by adding them to the Red Data Book. Law enforcement agencies also reported a 36
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The destruction of nature has become planetary in scale: over the past 50 years, wildlife populations have declined by 73%, forests are being cut down, rivers are polluted, and ecosystems are degrading. The last remaining nature reserves are isolated and increasingly under pressure from states and corporations. To stop this crisis, the global protected-area system must be urgently changed. We propose a concrete plan — the Territories of Full Ecological Tranquility (TFET) — and are setting out on expeditions to develop their future boundaries.
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