Bear attacks on people in June 2026: what has been documented and why is it happening?

Right now, the media are filled with headlines about bears approaching human settlements. These incidents are isolated, but they are happening, and because people have an instinctive fear of large predators, they quickly become headline news. I also want to point out that this wave of coverage is unfolding just before the government signs the nationwide bear hunting quota decree for the 2026/2027 hunting season.

Let me remind you that during the 2025/2026 season (one calendar year), the authorities authorized the shooting of more than 45,000 bears across the country. That is an all-time record. Most likely, the new hunting season will push the quota beyond 50,000 bears. We launched a project to protect bears, and we are the only ones openly discussing what is actually happening.

The situation is serious.

I confirm that bears are indeed coming into contact with people, and the number of conflicts will continue to grow. But I have also spoken before about the reasons behind this behavior: it is the result of habitat destruction, the collapse of their food base, and constant persecution by armed trophy hunters.

Let's go through everything step by step.

First, here is what the media are reporting right now and which incidents have been confirmed:

• On June 7, in Khabarovsk Krai (Topolevo village), a bear wandered through residential streets for more than an hour before chasing a local resident. The man escaped by climbing onto a beam and scaring the animal away by shouting.

  
  

• Around the same time, on June 7–8, a bear was spotted near the Mekhkolonna bus stop in Bodaybo, Irkutsk Region. Police were notified, and a response team was dispatched, but the animal had already disappeared. It has not been seen since.

  
  

• On June 9, in Sakhalin Region (near Pokrovka village, Naiba River), a bear attacked a fisherman. The man was hospitalized with severe lacerations to his head but remained conscious. During years of food shortages, bears often become aggressive when competing for scarce resources. I think that is obvious to anyone.

  
  

• On June 10, in Kemerovo Region (Krapivinsky District), residents reported a bear that regularly approached people and had already killed livestock on several farms. Once again, this demonstrates that natural food resources are insufficient. Naturally, predators will move toward human settlements in search of food. According to reports, the bear tore apart a pig near a farmer's home.

  
  

• On June 11, in Khabarovsk Krai (Mukhin settlement, Lazo District), a mother bear attacked two local residents after they unexpectedly encountered her cubs near a river. She was defending her offspring, and unfortunately, because of shrinking food supplies and habitat destruction, female bears are increasingly bringing their cubs closer to human settlements. This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS because it increases the risk of creating a synanthropic bear population.

  
  

• On June 15, in Kamchatka Krai (Ust-Bolsheretsky District, near Ozernovsky settlement), a bear attacked a fisherman at night within Hunting Area No. 26 "Primorsky." The situation was similar: a lack of natural food resources led to an encounter with people. The bear was shot and killed.

  
  

• On June 17, in Primorsky Krai (Zarechnoye village), a brown bear approached residential buildings, and local residents watched it from their windows.

  
  

• On June 20, in Tomsk Region (the town of Kedrovy), a bear attacked a person, after which authorities announced a culling campaign aimed at reducing the local bear population.

  
  

• On June 20–21, a bear was spotted in Moscow Region (Lukhovitsy), where it approached people and remained near a roadside. It showed no aggression. Nevertheless, regional authorities called for a search operation and the shooting of bears even near Moscow.

  
  

• On June 24, in Kemerovo Region (between Kedrovka and Solnechny settlements), a mother bear with her cub was seen walking along the roadside. As a vehicle approached, they retreated into the forest.

  
  

• On June 28, in Yakutia (Lensky District, along the Peledyuy Highway), a bear was spotted near a spring. Authorities were notified.

  
  

• On June 30, in Perm Krai (Kudymkar District, near the villages of Vasyukova and Tebenkova), a bear attacked a sixth-grade schoolboy who had been picking wild strawberries in the forest with his mother. The child suffered scratches but was otherwise unharmed and escaped with a fright. However, local berry pickers had reported seeing a mother bear with her cub in the area for two weeks beforehand. In other words, the mother bear had been bringing her cub there to feed on berries, and local residents were aware of it.

  
  
• On July 1, in Primorsky Krai (Vladivostok, Egersheld District), it was not a brown bear but an Asiatic black bear that swam across Amur Bay and entered the city. Police and the National Guard cordoned off the area before wildlife specialists immobilized the animal and transported it to veterinarians. Asiatic black bears are much smaller than brown bears and typically spend much of their time in trees, often denning in large tree cavities. For some reason, this individual swam approximately 10–13 kilometers across open water, alarming local residents and attracting widespread media attention.

That is the situation so far. But these incidents have already generated enormous public attention. We can clearly see that every conflict has specific triggers: mother bears protecting cubs, food waste and unattended food, fishing activities, and berry picking in feeding areas. All of this points to the same underlying cause: an insufficient natural food supply forcing predators into contact with people.

Naturally, every such incident immediately leads to calls for killing more bears. This narrative is skillfully used to expand the industry of recreational trophy hunting while avoiding any effort to address the real FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS.

Now I want to show you something that almost nobody else is talking about. Understanding these facts is essential if we want to avoid collective panic over bears and instead build an objective picture of what is actually happening.

In 2018, both the Prosecutor General's Office and the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia publicly expressed concern for bear conservation. They stated that Russia's bear population had declined by 36% in just two years—from 225,000 individuals in 2015 to 143,000 in 2017. The Prosecutor General's Office asked the Russian government to include all brown bear subspecies in the Russian Red Data Book.

But the scandal faded away, and after that the country's wildlife policy shifted rapidly toward expanding the mass killing of wild animals for recreational trophy hunting. Enclosed hunting was legalized, regulations were relaxed wherever possible, forests were leased to private interests for "VIP hunting," and lawmakers even introduced amendments allowing hunters to kill animals with bows and crossbows. Supposedly "for connoisseurs." At the same time, stores and restaurants became increasingly stocked with wild game meat. Many people will probably remember seeing venison, bear meat, elk meat, and other wild game appearing in gas stations, supermarket chains, and roadside cafés during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not farm-raised meat, of course; these products are supplied by large commercial hunting concessions.

On October 31, 2022, Pavel Chashchin, Director of Roslesinforg, publicly announced that nearly 36 million hectares of forest had been allocated to private hunting enterprises. Let me repeat that: PRIVATE enterprises. That represents roughly one-third of all publicly accessible forest lands in Russia. Officials proudly noted that the sector had grown by 12% since the beginning of the pandemic, viewing it as a highly profitable business. While the coronavirus pandemic was underway, people had few leisure options and increasingly traveled to the Russian taiga to shoot living targets.

Should I repeat that once again? Perhaps it is worth emphasizing: ONE-THIRD OF ALL PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE FOREST LANDS IN RUSSIA WAS TRANSFERRED INTO PRIVATE HANDS TO ORGANIZE COMMERCIAL KILLING OF WILDLIFE. AT THE SAME TIME, "HUNTING TOURISM" EXPANDED RAPIDLY.

Before that, in 2019, Dmitry Kobylkin served as Russia's Minister of Natural Resources. During the first meeting of the Ministry's Hunting Council, he stated that more than 30,000 people were professionally employed in the hunting industry, primarily as staff at hunting concessions, while the number of licensed hunters exceeded 4.5 million. The minister declared that the industry needed to be relaunched and expanded.

In other words, the minister himself openly acknowledged in 2019 that Russia already had nearly five million hunters—but wanted even more. It was after this that numerous legislative initiatives rapidly expanded the scale of wildlife killing.

Another important point is that alongside legal hunting, illegal wildlife killing also increased dramatically. In the same year, 2019, Andrey Filatov, Director of the Ministry's Department for Hunting Management, stated that losses from illegal hunting were estimated at approximately 18 billion rubles annually—around two billion more than the economic volume of legal hunting.

Can you imagine the scale of wildlife killing? This was only a year after the Prosecutor General's Office and the FSB had called for stronger protection of bears and urged that they be listed in the Russian Red Data Book. It was as though nobody had listened. The discussion simply shifted back to the billions of rubles generated by killing wildlife.

The following year, 2020, after multiple laws expanding recreational hunting had been adopted and forests were increasingly transferred into private hands, Andrey Filatov publicly stated: "There are around five million hunters in Russia." In other words, he confirmed the rapid increase in the number of people seeking to shoot wildlife in the Russian taiga.

Business was booming. Money was flowing. The strategy of expanding wildlife harvesting proved profitable, and once that became clear, the industry accelerated even further.

Then, in 2025, this policy direction was reaffirmed at the highest level. Apparently, exploiting wildlife even more became the next objective. On December 10, 2025, Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources published an article titled "Two Scenarios and Growing Animal Populations: The State Duma Discusses the Hunting Development Strategy Through 2035." According to the publication, Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Murad Kerimov presented lawmakers with the Ministry's draft Hunting Development Strategy through 2035.

I will not retell the entire document. In essence, it proposes dramatically expanding the harvesting of wildlife while generating substantially greater financial returns, with the goal of making revenues from the hunting industry a significant contributor to the country's GDP.

Now, back to the bears.

Alongside the ongoing expansion of wildlife killing, as you know, numerous legislative initiatives are also being introduced to intensify the exploitation of wild nature. These include proposals that would effectively legalize the destruction of protected areas across the country, permit large-scale clear-cutting of protective mountain forests, expand logging around Lake Baikal, and much more. Russia's entire protected area system is under threat. It is effectively being appropriated.

And now we see hungry bears searching for food. We are told this is because there are supposedly so many bears that they no longer fit into the wild. Claims of "rapidly growing wildlife populations" sound rather strange against well-established scientific evidence showing that global vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 73% over recent decades. Yet according to official reports, wildlife populations in Russia are not declining—they are supposedly increasing rapidly despite the ongoing large-scale exploitation of natural ecosystems.

Extreme wildfires. Catastrophic logging. The direct dismantling of protected areas. And a recreational trophy hunting industry that has already taken control of one-third of all publicly accessible forest lands, transferring them into PRIVATE hands for the systematic shooting of wildlife across the Russian taiga.

And all of this comes with the same explanation: "because animal populations are increasing."

Or could it simply be because someone wants to make even more money?

And now bears are appearing near people. This becomes advantageous for a system that wants to expand the scale of wildlife killing because it fits perfectly into the officially promoted "development" model extending through 2035. The system has a direct interest in bear-human conflicts because every incident can be presented as evidence: "Look—they're right outside your windows. There must be too many of them. We need even more hunting permits."

No one will tell you that these are starving animals deprived of their habitat and natural food sources, desperately trying to survive. Instead, what you will see in the media are sensational headlines portraying terrifying monsters supposedly coming to "eat people."

© PAVEL PASHKOV