Russia has a bear problem — attacks are reported almost daily. Officials are killing ‘potentially conflict-prone’ bears and want greater powers to drastically reduce their population.

Russia has a bear problem — attacks are reported almost daily. Officials are killing ‘potentially conflict-prone’ bears and want greater powers to drastically reduce their population. Reports of brown bear attacks on people have poured in almost daily from across Russia since late summer 2026. Here are just a few fatal cases from the past three weeks: - August 19. A bear attacked a 29-year-old tourist near the village of Artybash in the Turochaksky district, Altai Republic. At night, the bear entered the tent where she was sleeping with her fiancé, dragged her into the forest, and killed her. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that he had proposed to her before the trip. She worked for the Emergency Situations Ministry’s Main Directorate for the Novosibirsk region. - August 31. Two women from the Yeniseysky district in Krasnoyarsk Krai went missing while picking mushrooms near the settlement of Podtesovo. Their bodies were found on September 2 showing signs of a bear attack. - September 6. A bear killed a 40-year-old man as he walked through the woods in the settlement of Yuzhno-Yeniseysky, Krasnoyarsk Krai. - September 7. In the Zakamensky district of the Republic of Buryatia, a bear attacked a local resident about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the village of Khurtaga while he and his wife were out moving their cows. His wife managed to run away and call for help, and the bear was eventually driven off, but the man had sustained injuries too severe to survive. Who’s to blame? Authorities attribute the bears’ growing presence near populated areas — and the resulting threat to people — to the animals’ seasonal activity, a shortage of natural food sources, easy access to food waste, and a growing bear population. How well these explanations hold up scientifically remains unclear. A poor harvest of berries, mushrooms, and pine nuts in the taiga has forced bears to search for food elsewhere, the Russian news outlet Kommersant Sibir reports. Kemerovo Governor Ilya Serdyuk, for his part, has suggested that wildfires in Krasnoyarsk Krai are pushing bears into the Kuzbass. Bears approaching people is a familiar problem in Kamchatka, but many other regions have not previously encountered anything like it, Vladimir Gordienko, a wildlife biologist and researcher at the Kronotsky State Nature Reserve, told the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. Bear encounters have nonetheless been recorded across Russia, mostly in its Asian part. “This is an unusual situation, when this kind of behavior — bears acting erratically — is being recorded simultaneously across many territories,” said Nikolai Maltsev, head of the Krasnoyarsk Krai State Hunting Oversight Agency. Dmitry Sergeev, a regulation expert at Khakassia’s Natural Resources Ministry, also calls the situation “abnormal.” He said the bear population exceeds the norm. “They don’t have enough space, so they’re coming out directly to people,” he said, adding that this has been happening “for the second year now, and I don’t think it will be the last.” He did not specify how, or how precisely, the animal population had been counted. How many bears are there in Russia Russia’s brown bear population totals 307,900, according to the Natural Resources Ministry. The largest populations are in Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk Krais, Kamchatka, and the Irkutsk region. The ministry estimates that the country’s bear population has grown 2.3 times since 1990. How are authorities proposing to deal with the bears? Authorities have declared a state of heightened alert in several districts of the Kemerovo region, in Bratsk in the Irkutsk region, in Krasnoyarsk and several districts of Krasnoyarsk Krai, in the town of Abaza in Khakassia, in the Charyshsky district of Altai Krai, and in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, citing bears approaching populated areas and attacking people. In the Turochaksky district of the Republic of Altai, where the tourist was killed, officials have imposed a curfew and changed school schedules. Since September 7, authorities have banned entry into Krasnoyarskiye Stolby National Park after dark. They are also urging Krasnoyarsk residents and tourists to avoid the remote parts of Tatyshev Island, where a bear was spotted, and have introduced access restrictions at Tunkinsky National Park in Buryatia and the Altai Biosphere Reserve. Authorities are shooting bears that threaten people. The Republic of Altai’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology announced that more than 50 bears have been killed since the attack on the tourist, with licenses issued to shoot 157 more. Krasnoyarsk Krai’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry announced in early September that more than 180 “potentially conflict-prone individuals” had been killed in the region, and the head of Krasnoyarsk’s State Hunting Oversight Agency said 60 bears had been shot in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk alone. Regional authorities say these measures are not enough. The governor of the Magadan region, where bears appear in populated areas every year, has called for changing the rules governing bear population control. “A bear that comes into a populated area will pass its new skills on to the next generation. Something needs to be done about this,” he said in an interview with RIA Novosti on September 9. It is unclear what his claim about the animals’ behavior is based on. No such phenomenon is described in the scientific literature. The governor called current legislation outdated and said officials need to be “thinking about the people who could be killed or injured.” On September 11, Russia’s Natural Resources Ministry announced that it is collecting proposals from the regions on changing the laws governing bear population control. If the situation does not change and the winter of 2026–2027 turns out to be harsh, Tuva’s Natural Resources Ministry predicts, “a second wave of hungry, non-hibernating bears will hit us in the spring,” Kommersant Sibir writes. Killing the animals alone will not solve the problem, experts warn. Wholesale extermination of every bear that turns up near populated areas will not help, Dmitry Taranenko, a candidate of biological sciences and senior researcher at the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the Russian state news agency TASS. Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said bears are approaching people in search of food, although the scientific literature shows that food-seeking accounts for only a small share of encounters. Most happen by chance, far from cities. Regional authorities are focusing on unauthorized waste dumps that can draw bears into populated areas, he told RIA Novosti, and are distributing safety guidelines urging tourists “not to leave food in their tent or behind at the campfire.” At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication. 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