Seven people have died in bear attacks across Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region since the start of September 2026, regional investigators say, the worst monthly toll from bear maulings the Siberian territory has logged in recent memory. The seventh death was confirmed on September 25, and state investigators have opened a criminal case accusing officials at the region’s environment ministry of negligence. Krasnoyarsk’s bear population has climbed past 26,000 animals, a 2.5-fold jump that investigators tie directly to the deaths.
Four Deaths Wire Reports Have Named
Of the seven fatalities, four carry enough detail in wire reporting to reconstruct what happened. A 51-year-old woman was fatally mauled in her own garden in the village of Voznesenka after she went outside to check on a bear trying to force its way into the pen holding her livestock. A 39-year-old man working as a logger was killed elsewhere in the region, and two women died in a single attack while picking mushrooms in the forest, an ordinary autumn activity across rural Siberia. The remaining three deaths this month appear only in the region’s aggregate count, without names or circumstances in the reporting available so far, a gap that is itself a routine feature of how Russian regional authorities disclose rural fatalities.
Russia’s Natural Resources and Environment Ministry has pushed back on the alarm, telling reporters that “encounters between brown bears and humans have always been recorded — for as long as people have lived near forests” and putting the country’s typical annual toll at roughly 30 attacks, a baseline the current run has already run past well before autumn ends. Residents kept filing reports anyway. According to wire reporting drawn from investigators’ own statements, more than 120 reports of bears entering settlements have been logged across more than 15 districts and three cities, Krasnoyarsk, Zheleznogorsk and Zelenogorsk, since the pattern began.
A Bear Population Investigators Say Doubled Since Soviet Times
Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Siberian territory at the center of the case, stretches from the Sayan Mountains in the south to the Arctic’s Taymyr Peninsula in the north and covers 2.37 million square kilometers, making it Russia’s second-largest region after Sakha. It is home to roughly 27,000 of the country’s brown bears, a local population investigators say grew 2.5-fold to more than 26,000 animals in a short span. Nationally, Russia’s brown bear population has roughly doubled since 1990, climbing from about 130,000 animals to more than 308,000 today, according to figures cited in the investigators’ statement.
Investigators argue that growth outran any matching expansion of hunting quotas or population-control programs in the region. An unnamed conservation expert cited in regional coverage of the wider surge points to several factors compounding at once: milder, shorter winters that let more cubs survive to adulthood, a poor 2026 harvest of pine nuts that left bears short of the fat reserves they need before hibernation, declining hunting pressure that leaves fewer cautious animals culled from the population, and wildfires that pushed bears out of burned habitat and toward settlements, particularly in the region’s Arctic north. Brown bears typically enter a pre-hibernation feeding stretch called hyperphagia each autumn, during which an animal can double its body weight and add up to 180 kilograms of fat, a drive that pulls them toward any food source, including the ones people keep near their homes.
A Case Built Around Six Deaths, Then a Seventh
State investigators opened their case after the sixth confirmed death of the month, formally accusing officials at the regional environment ministry of negligence resulting in fatalities. Their statement said officials had received “numerous warnings of danger” about the growing bear population but “failed to take measures to regulate the predator population,” language that places responsibility on the agency that manages wildlife rather than on any individual hunter, logger or landowner. The seventh death, confirmed a day after wire services first reported the case, was folded into the region’s monthly count without prompting a separate filing.
A monthly toll of seven is unusual even for a region bordering some of Russia’s largest tracts of taiga, and it lands as bear range keeps pushing into land that people use for logging, foraging and small-scale farming, according to the wire account that first tallied the deaths.
Fatal Attacks Beyond Krasnoyarsk’s Borders
The Krasnoyarsk toll is not isolated within Russia’s bear country this year. In Irkutsk region, to the east, a male pensioner was killed while picking mushrooms and two men died while gathering wild plants. In Altai region, two tourists were attacked in August, one of them fatally, and in the Tuva Republic, a bear killed Alexander Kuzmenko, a fishing guide and the father of NHL winger Andrei Kuzmenko, while he was out on a fishing trip.
Regional reporting puts the nationwide toll at 19 people killed by brown bears across the Far North, Siberia and the Far East since April 2026, a stretch covering Siberia’s 13.1 million square kilometers, about three-quarters of Russia’s total territory. Authorities have already culled roughly 200 bears across Siberia in August alone, and five regions have declared high-alert status, adding nighttime curfews and restricting access to parks and forests, yet the deaths are accumulating faster than any single ministry has moved to explain them.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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