As Interfax reported, on September 22 a group of tourists from Moscow set off by boat up the Great Yenisei into the remote taiga and set up camp on the riverbank. During the day, a bear attacked them; one of the men, who was about 60 years old, was badly mauled in the face.
The injured man was first taken by boat to the village of Toora-Khem in Tuva, then in the evening of September 22 he was taken to the Todzha Central District Hospital. The next day at noon, an air ambulance picked him up and took him to the republican hospital in Kyzyl, where the man later died.
The head of the republican State Hunting Supervision, Artysh Salchak, said that the tourists went into the taiga despite the ban on visiting forests and brought a lot of food with them. According to him, the route was not registered with the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
Hunters and police officers headed to the site of the attack to shoot the bear. In Tuva, a ban on visiting forests is in effect until November 30 because of bear activity, and a ban on fishing has been in place since September 10.
Salchak added that in 2026 this is the first bear attack on a person in the region. He also said that over the past couple of months there have been more than a dozen bear attacks on livestock in the republic, and overall the bear population in Siberia is considered high.
According to Salchak, Tuva’s municipalities are taking additional safety measures, and in each of them hunter teams are working to shoot bears that come close to populated areas and pose a danger. He linked the frequent appearances of the animals near villages and herders’ camps to a shortage of food in the forests and a poor harvest of cedar nuts and berries.
Sources
