RUSSIA24 — Reportazh
20260920 063200 UTC
352 transcript segments
Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking
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[00:01:30] the gates to Lake Teletskoye, the small Baikal of Western
[00:01:33] Siberia, as it is often called in guidebooks, the Biya River begins
[00:01:37] here, one of the large rivers of the region,
[00:01:40] all around, as far as the eye can see, taiga forests.
[00:01:54] It's quiet here early in the morning and peaceful, but in the evenings
[00:01:58] it's not without
[00:02:00] danger to be outside, with the onset of dusk locals try not to leave their
[00:02:04] homes,
[00:02:08] we had such an incident, my
[00:02:11] wife and I were sitting at home, approximately it was
[00:02:14] 9:30 PM, that evening Vitaly and his family
[00:02:18] were already getting ready for bed, when suddenly, a strange noise was heard in
[00:02:22] the yard, I heard how my
[00:02:26] fence began to break, the cracking of boards, here we can...
[00:02:30] you can see, here they are, and
[00:02:33] the heavy breathing of this bear, like this
[00:02:35] growl, Vitaly decided
[00:02:39] to act, the plan was short, he wanted to run out
[00:02:42] and scream, he thought the beast would get scared
[00:02:45] and leave, I open the door and see his
[00:02:47] paw up to his elbow, it turns out, already on
[00:02:51] the terrace, here are the traces of
[00:02:55] claws, I was simply stunned and how
[00:02:59] I scream. at him
[00:03:02] and close the door, I held the door very tightly, and
[00:03:06] I felt how this big body, it ran across
[00:03:10] the porch and went to
[00:03:12] another part of the plot, there it climbed over
[00:03:15] the fence. The bear did not just climb over the fence,
[00:03:19] it knocked out several wooden sections with its paws to
[00:03:22] pass. Vitaly called emergency
[00:03:25] services. Hunters and gamekeepers
[00:03:28] arrived, inspected.
[00:04:00] He has no weapons to somehow protect himself after that
[00:04:03] incident, he installed sensors on the side of the forest, they
[00:04:06] detect the approach of wild
[00:04:08] animals,
[00:04:13] most
[00:04:13] importantly,
[00:04:17] this is a device,
[00:04:21] this is a siren with a motion sensor, so I set it up, if someone
[00:04:24] approaches here, then it will be audible,
[00:04:28] this is a sound one, it's somewhere around
[00:04:31] 120-130 decibels, much stronger than a
[00:04:35] car signal,
[00:04:38] and a pepper spray, so its range is about
[00:04:41] 5 meters, it hits, well, accordingly, it scares away like
[00:04:44] a pepper spray but for
[00:04:46] an animal,
[00:04:53] that same night, when the beast broke into his house,
[00:04:56] a tragedy occurred nearby on the bank of the Biya river. At
[00:05:00] 1 AM he came to the tent, apparently, he also smelled food, most
[00:05:03] likely,
[00:05:07] this is the very place where, as the locals say, the tent was,
[00:05:11] further down is a cliff and...
[00:05:14] Snezhana came to rest in Altai from the Novosibirsk region
[00:05:18] with her boyfriend. The day before, he proposed to her.
[00:05:21] Tourists were presumably warned that bear
[00:05:25] sightings have become more frequent in the Turachaksky district, but the young people
[00:05:28] probably underestimated the danger. The girl could not be
[00:05:31] saved.
[00:05:32] The village of Artybash, Lake Teletskoye, and
[00:05:37] the surrounding areas are all tourist spots. People
[00:05:40] love to come here. Here is also part of the Altai
[00:05:44] Biosphere Reserve.
[00:05:47] Currently, all eco-routes of
[00:05:50] the reserve are closed for visits. The reason is the same.
[00:05:53] Increased activity of brown bears. But
[00:05:56] on the territory itself there is a small village, Yaylyu.
[00:05:59] Mainly reserve employees live there. Tatiana and
[00:06:03] Roman are among them. They track the number of animals,
[00:06:06] observe their movement, mark their
[00:06:09] resting places.
[00:06:13] Now we are walking along one of the penetration
[00:06:16] routes, along one of the routes that bears use to go to
[00:06:20] the village, well, here it's a forest ravine, here
[00:06:24] it's an electric fence, they pass here absolutely calmly, but
[00:06:27] well, of course, at night. Tracking the movement of animals is done by
[00:06:30] camera traps, which record every passage past
[00:06:33] them. Currently, the bear
[00:06:36] population is large, about
[00:06:39] 30-25 individuals, so they pass.
[00:07:42] here in the reserve there are gardens, old apple and pear trees,
[00:07:45] planted back in the fifties, broken trees,
[00:07:49] bear's handiwork, here just
[00:07:52] two weeks ago everything was covered in pears,
[00:07:56] there were a lot of fruits, everything was falling, and
[00:08:00] naturally these smells attracted the bear here, and as
[00:08:03] you can see, here is the result, that is,
[00:08:06] a big bear came and just broke
[00:08:10] it like this, bent it and... ate all of it, then lay here,
[00:08:14] probably, and just feasted on these
[00:08:16] pears.
[00:08:18] Yuri Nikolaevich, a biologist Akhmatovet, has been observing brown
[00:08:21] bears for 35 years, says this year is not
[00:08:25] anomalous, but very difficult due to a shortage of food in the
[00:08:28] taiga. Simply, this year there are no cedar
[00:08:31] nuts, in Siberia the brown
[00:08:34] bear mainly gets fat, puts on weight,
[00:08:38] stores fat for winter, this is on
[00:08:41] cedar nuts. this is its main food, if it's
[00:08:44] not there, then it looks for an alternative, but
[00:08:48] in recent decades it has started
[00:08:50] to look for an alternative not in nature, but with
[00:08:54] people.
[00:08:57] 2026 is not the first difficult year in terms of food for
[00:09:01] bears. Yuri Nikolaevich recalls similar situations.
[00:09:04] The problem is that if a bear once tasted something somewhere, it
[00:09:08] remembers the way to that place for a long time.
[00:09:13] up to 40 years he can live quite well, he has a good memory, that
[00:09:17] is, in 2008 he came here, he
[00:09:20] ate, then there was 2014,
[00:09:24] 2018, then the years were milder,
[00:09:27] but there were cedar nuts, but very few, and
[00:09:31] he was not satisfied, and he still came here, he
[00:09:35] came to
[00:09:35] the villages,
[00:10:25] with diminished fear of man, they can easily
[00:10:28] overcome it.
[00:10:44] The reserve is a specially protected area, hunting and culling
[00:10:47] of animals, including bears, are prohibited here,
[00:10:51] so all that employees and residents of the village of Ya can protect themselves with...
[00:11:35] Of course, at a short distance, but the bear will definitely not
[00:11:38] approach.
[00:11:41] A curfew is in effect in the reserve. At nightfall, residents of the village of Yaily
[00:11:44] do not go out into the streets, they also carefully clean up all garbage,
[00:11:48] food waste is disposed of in special containers,
[00:11:52] inaccessible to...
[00:12:26] No one can reliably say how many bears are currently in
[00:12:30] the taiga, what their population is. They are counted using various non-contact
[00:12:33] methods that do not provide a 100%
[00:12:35] estimate.
[00:12:38] And here we are moving, for example, along country forest roads and
[00:12:42] we see on the soil
[00:12:45] traces of bears and
[00:12:49] roughly speaking, now if we go to the taiga with
[00:12:52] you, we will drive along a forest road.
[00:12:55] terrain, approximately 2 to 4 km,
[00:12:58] there will be tracks of another completely
[00:13:00] different bear. Nikolay Maksimychev
[00:13:04] is an amateur hunter, he has been going to the taiga for game since childhood, for more than
[00:13:07] 30 years. To meet a bear, you had to go very
[00:13:11] far, deep into the taiga, and parents,
[00:13:15] uncles, from childhood there were conversations, there was a whole story about how a bear was obtained,
[00:13:19] they went 30 km away, they
[00:13:22] found it there. Now there are many
[00:13:25] more predators. You don't have to look for them, they
[00:13:35] one plot to another, where he ate pears. Hunters believe that
[00:13:38] such bear behavior is associated not only with a poor cedar harvest, but
[00:13:42] also with a strong population growth in recent years. Since
[00:13:46] the moment when our legislation changed, we
[00:13:50] no longer have state-owned game farms, when there were no more regular
[00:13:53] hunters who had a plan. No one
[00:13:56] practically reacted to the bear task, and now there is a large
[00:14:00] overpopulation, bear hunting is difficult and dangerous - says
[00:14:03] Nikolay, and the killed animal, due to its specific nature, is not very
[00:14:06] in demand on the market.
[00:14:09] A bear is omnivorous, it eats carrion, it likes
[00:14:13] to kill an animal, bury it, for example, yes, it
[00:14:16] rotted, when every third bear is practically
[00:14:20] sick, well, therefore it has no
[00:14:23] value.
[00:15:25] It was visible. Galina Ivanova's family
[00:15:28] has been working here in the area for many years. They have their own
[00:15:31] apiary, they regularly take honey to markets.
[00:15:35] Yes, we meet bears everywhere now.
[00:15:37] When you drive home, two of them can cross the road,
[00:15:41] a mama bear constantly walks here, with her cubs, but she is actually
[00:15:44] old, she doesn't come here, but there are many
[00:15:48] young ones. Dmitrievka is not a remote
[00:15:52] village, there are about 800 residents here, a school, a kindergarten,
[00:15:56] a library, a club, people keep livestock, grow vegetables,
[00:15:59] fruits, work, normal life, the order
[00:16:02] of which is disturbed by bears this season, if earlier
[00:16:06] bears only walked around the village, without entering it, then this
[00:16:09] year they have already, specifically in Dmitrievka, in two
[00:16:13] personal subsidiary farms, destroyed hives, in the neighboring
[00:16:17] village of Udalovka, they also entered gardens.
[00:16:20] The authorities have taken measures. A curfew has been introduced,
[00:16:24] raids have been organized, and the schedule of school lessons has been changed.
[00:16:28] At the municipal district level, by decision of
[00:16:31] the emergency commission, it was decided that in
[00:16:35] the evening, from 8:00 PM,
[00:16:38] our children should not be on the street. To understand
[00:16:42] the scale of the problem, we turned to one of the leading bear specialists in
[00:16:46] Russia. Mikhail Arsenievich Krechmar, zoologist,
[00:16:50] hunter-naturalist, candidate of biological sciences, writer and
[00:16:53] journalist from the Far East. Since
[00:16:55] 2012, he has been the editor-in-chief of the Russian hunting
[00:16:58] magazine. He has been studying brown bears since 1986.
[00:17:02] Statistics concerning the number of
[00:17:05] bears are
[00:17:08] very relative.
[00:17:11] Personally, I don't believe them at all, but
[00:17:14] there are some indirect indicators by which
[00:17:17] one can judge that the number of bears has
[00:17:21] increased by approximately three times in our
[00:17:24] country since the late 1980s. According to official
[00:17:28] data from the Ministry of Natural Resources, as of 2026, there are almost
[00:17:31] 308 thousand brown bears in Russia, in
[00:17:35] 1990 there were about
[00:17:37] 133,000. The main population is concentrated in
[00:17:41] Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk Krais, with 26,000 in
[00:17:45] each. In Kamchatka - 24,000, in
[00:17:48] Irkutsk Oblast - 22, in Altai - just
[00:17:51] under 5,000, in Buryatia - slightly over
[00:17:54] 6,000 individuals. All estimates, even very
[00:17:57] accurate ones: the number of any large mammals,
[00:18:01] roe deer, elk,
[00:18:04] and deer, whatever you like, they
[00:18:06] have an error of 25%,
[00:18:10] that is, if you counted 100 animals somewhere, then
[00:18:13] you can say that there are
[00:18:17] 75 of them, or you can say that there are 125 of them, in both cases you will not
[00:18:21] be lying. According to the data from the Ministry of Natural Resources, the situation
[00:18:25] this year is not anomalous, usually there are
[00:18:28] 20-30 incidents per year, in 2025 there were
[00:18:32] 34 cases, in
[00:18:33] 2024.
[00:18:37] his own data, from bears
[00:18:41] from 30 to 80
[00:18:43] people die, well now, of course,
[00:18:47] it feels like a big trouble has occurred, in many places
[00:18:50] there are many bears and so on, but now
[00:18:54] we seem to be on the
[00:18:57] verge of major problems. Irkutsk
[00:19:01] region - gardening partnership, in summer people live here with
[00:19:04] families, come for berries, mushrooms and... silence, but this
[00:19:08] year they couldn't get a full rest, bears came out to
[00:19:12] people and one of them went right into
[00:19:14] the yard.
[00:19:21] That day Olga stayed at her parents' dacha with two small
[00:19:24] children, put them to bed, wanted to wash dishes, but something
[00:19:28] stopped her, then the cat started asking to go outside. The cat went out of this door
[00:19:31] here, and his muzzle was in this window. And he
[00:19:35] slowly began to... and go around like that, he went
[00:19:39] to the garden bed, she closed the door,
[00:19:43] first thing, the children, I told her, well, I showed her on
[00:19:46] the camera that a bear came, we need to play hide-and-seek, let's sit quietly,
[00:19:50] then she remembered, the front door was not
[00:19:52] locked,
[00:20:00] when the bear broke in, I closed it, I managed to close the door
[00:20:03] like this, I stood like this, bracing my feet against the walls, and stood
[00:20:07] like this, holding the door, like this, she called her brother, who started
[00:20:11] remotely shouting at the beast into the security
[00:20:13] camera.
[00:20:23] Olga believes that bears are attracted to dachas not only by berries in
[00:20:26] the garden beds, but also by the condition of common dumps, which are overflowing, and
[00:20:30] also by food waste in the plots themselves. In that garden bed there
[00:20:34] were watermelon rinds, there were, well, garbage there.
[00:20:56] in the chat they keep writing that now they are afraid to let their children out to play, that they
[00:20:58] are afraid to go to the dacha, they are afraid.
[00:21:13] A serious situation is currently happening in Buryatia, where bear sightings
[00:21:16] are recorded daily, authorities call
[00:21:19] it... a mass phenomenon, almost fifty reports in just one day,
[00:21:23] and these are not just sightings, this year
[00:21:26] in the republic, bears attacked people, and he bites my
[00:21:30] legs, just like that, he grabs like that and bites,
[00:21:34] like this, he grabs like this,
[00:21:37] and I have only one thought
[00:21:41] in my head, how to get rid of him, she's just
[00:21:44] doing it, I'm trying to hit him in the eye with my right hand,
[00:21:48] but my reaction, his... reaction, it's like, well, earth and
[00:21:52] sky, in short, he shakes his head, and apparently, he hit
[00:21:55] with a log, that's the only thing
[00:21:58] noted, well, nothing, everything's fine,
[00:22:02] that's it, and I start screaming wildly, and my voice
[00:22:05] is loud, a good voice, Sergey
[00:22:08] Georgievich was admitted to the surgery department in early September, with deep
[00:22:12] lacerations after a bear attack, but he was lucky
[00:22:16] to escape, two other cases of residents encountering predators
[00:22:20] ended fatally, the reasons for such bear behavior are the same as
[00:22:23] throughout Siberia. Yes, undoubtedly, the appearance of bears near settlements
[00:22:27] is primarily due to unauthorized dumps, people
[00:22:30] feed them, leave food waste, animal carcasses
[00:22:34] are thrown, as it were, in the forest, which
[00:22:37] attracts bears. In the republic, special brigades of
[00:22:41] hunters have been formed, 24 in 12 districts,
[00:22:44] patrolling at night and in the morning, they pay
[00:22:48] 1,500 for a kill.
[00:22:58] He has a collection of trophies at home acquired over decades,
[00:23:01] and this is a simple goat,
[00:23:04] a local, a local goat was here,
[00:23:07] and during the rutting season it was
[00:23:10] shot, but for him a bear is not just a trophy, it is
[00:23:14] an adversary that he knows well and explains,
[00:23:18] the reason is not so much hunger. Bears have forgotten how to fear
[00:23:21] humans. In the nineties, eighties, there were commercial
[00:23:25] hunters who were on staff, they were in the forests, they were sitting in
[00:23:29] the forest, uh squirrel hunters, there were a lot
[00:23:32] of squirrel hunters, and there were a lot of sable hunters, they hunted sables,
[00:23:36] and the bear encountered
[00:23:39] humans in the forest. Now, uh, there are few
[00:23:42] sable hunters, it turns out that there aren't many people in
[00:23:46] the forest, this bear came down, he didn't
[00:23:50] see people, and a person for a bear, well,
[00:23:53] it's like another food
[00:23:56] chain link, and advice from an experienced hunter in case
[00:24:00] an encounter with a bear does happen, don't
[00:24:02] panic, most importantly,
[00:24:06] you will have the opportunity to slowly, slowly retreat, do not make
[00:24:09] sudden movements,
[00:24:11] this bear will in any case
[00:24:15] react to...
[00:24:18] a sudden movement or running, if a person runs,
[00:24:21] that's it, it's his prey, he
[00:24:25] will catch up, the bear will catch up, while in Siberia bears come out to dacha
[00:24:44] settlements and villages, in the remote taiga of Khakassia an event occurred
[00:24:47] that... almost ended in tragedy, there in the Khakassky
[00:24:51] reserve, at the hermitage of Lykova, a predator
[00:24:54] appeared.
[00:24:56] Agafya Karpovna was busy with household chores
[00:25:05] near the hut, when suddenly she noticed a large
[00:25:08] animal on the hillside. It sits on the mountain,
[00:25:12] the bear was tried to be driven away with firecrackers
[00:25:15] and shots, it hid somewhere closer.
[00:25:19] it saw
[00:25:21] us,
[00:25:25] ran away, now near Agafya Lykova's hut
[00:25:29] volunteers are on duty 24/7, helping her with household chores, making sure
[00:25:31] the bear doesn't come too close to the hermit's dwelling.
[00:25:35] The main thing now, say
[00:25:39] experts, is that the peak of collisions and unexpected encounters with
[00:25:41] bears is still ahead. I certainly wouldn't want to be
[00:25:45] a prophet of doom, but... Absolutely
[00:25:49] certainly, the peak of conflicts will
[00:25:52] fall
[00:25:54] on the last weeks before
[00:25:56] they go into hibernation and on the first 2 weeks
[00:26:00] after the snow
[00:26:02] cover falls, well, that's how it always happens,
[00:26:06] if there are still tracks for another week after the snow, it makes sense
[00:26:10] to be on alert. The Ministry of Natural Resources has already announced
[00:26:13] a call for proposals from regions on how to change hunting laws,
[00:26:16] hunters demand that quotas be removed and the license period
[00:26:20] extended for the entire season. We don't
[00:26:23] have a common understanding of a wild nature
[00:26:26] management plan, and we must manage
[00:26:29] it, and throughout the country. The cold snap
[00:26:32] is coming soon, then it will be
[00:26:35] clear: have the bears gone into hibernation or remained
[00:26:38] roamers? Mikhail Krechmar notes that if
[00:26:42] bear tracks are seen a week or two after the first
[00:26:45] snow, one should be wary, the peak has not yet passed.