This spring, dozens of Russian cities saw animal rights activists rally against the so-called “Ostanina Bill,” which proposes a radical solution to the problem of stray animals: allowing regional authorities to kill them. The scandalous bill, which animal advocates call “utterly bloodthirsty,” has yet to be adopted — and the protests, unexpectedly massive under wartime conditions, may have played a part in deterring it. Russian authorities have been trying to address the issue of stray animals for years, often via inconsistent, contradictory approaches. The war has hardened people further. Calls have been made to massacre dogs and divert money from shelters to drone manufacturing. In as many as 16 Russian regions, stray dogs are already being killed — despite the absence of a federal law and in defiance of the decision of the Constitutional Court. Animal rights defenders are trying to fight back — and sometimes they even win their battles, saving a few animals from slaughter.
In the early morning of March 18, a dirty white van pulled over near a private house in the village of Dubrovka, Bryansk Region. Two men got out. One of them kept watch while the other, large and bearded and dressed in camo, entered the property through the gate. He had a quick look around to check that the owners were not in, then he grabbed Druzhok — “Little Buddy,” the family dog, a three-colored mutt who was resting peacefully in the yard — by the neck and dragged him into the street.
The accomplices then made a staged video claiming to have caught a wriggling Druzhok in the snow outside the gate. They tossed the dog into the van and drove off.
Surprisingly, the trespasser and dog thief was not deterred even by a CCTV camera on the property — one that recorded all of his actions. Thanks to the footage, the story of Druzhok's abduction is known in great detail.
The men in the video are not common thieves looking to collect a ransom for the dog. They are dog catchers working for entrepreneur Yury Bogomolov, who secured a government contract for catching stray animals in the Kaluga, Tula, Smolensk, and Bryansk regions. Under the contract, the capture of poor Druzhok will bring the entrepreneur $32.25. The state should then pay another $73 for his sterilization, chipping, and return to the initial location — plus a $2.70 per diem for the dog's subsistence during the period of his detention. Bogomolov's enterprise is a family business: Yury is in charge of catching strays, and his wife Irina manages the Podari Zhizn («Give Life») shelter, where these dogs are taken. Before 2022, the shelter was run by his son Denis.
This is far from the first time Bogomolov's hires have been accused of grabbing dogs that were not strays, but previous attempts were less brazen. Bogomolov himself did not consider himself caught red-handed: he even tried to demand a $140 ransom for the return of the dog from the shelter (allegedly as compensation for food and vaccination). However, after the ensuing uproar in local media, he returned Druzhok for free.
Dog catchers tried to demand a $140 ransom for the kidnapped dog, allegedly in compensation for food and vaccination
Animal rights activists have been trying to draw attention to Bogomolov's actions for years. According to their information, he uses illegal, cruel methods of catching (such as prohibited choke loops or borderline lethal doses of anesthetics). The activists pin their hopes on publicity to discourage municipal authorities from further cooperation with this man. Unfortunately, Bogomolov's approach is typical of the Russian stray dog control market.
According to a joint estimate by the Center for the Study of Nutrition and Animal Welfare, the Nika Foundation, and Ipsos, four percent of Russia's dogs and cats have no owners — that’s roughly 2.8 million stray cats and 800,000 stray dogs nationwide. Around 180,000 stray animals live in shelters (90% of them are dogs), while the rest survive on the streets. Admittedly, the situation is slowly improving: in 2021 experts in a similar study counted more than 4 million homeless animals, of which only 144,000 were kept in shelters.
Presently, Russia's animal control program is based on the Law on the Responsible Treatment of Animals, adopted in 2018 after being proposed by United Russia Duma Deputy Vladimir Burmatov. The legislation enshrined the Trap–Neuter–Vaccinate–Return (TNVR) approach.
The system works as follows: a contractor collects requests for catching animals in his area and schedules calls for his team. Dogs and cats are captured using humane methods (automatic traps, adjustable catch poles, darts filled with non-hazardous anesthetics) and taken to a shelter where they are quarantined, neutered or spayed, vaccinated against rabies, and chipped or tagged.
If no one volunteers to adopt the animal within 20 days — and provided that it shows no aggression — it is released to the same location where it was caught. The capture and release must be recorded to avoid conflicts. It is forbidden to capture animals in the presence of children, to keep them anywhere other than in shelters, to injure them in the process of capture, or to kill them (other than via euthanasia in cases of unbearable suffering). Or at least, that’s how the approach should work in theory.
The law prohibits catching animals in front of children, keeping them anywhere but shelters, injuring, or killing them
“At present, it is up to each municipality to decide whether to build shelters and capture animals using public sector resources or delegate it to a private contractor. The overwhelming majority has gone for the second option,” explains Yury Koretskikh, executive director of the Alliance of Animal Defenders. “Very few municipal shelters have been built, and they only started to come into operation last year. Many municipalities were in no hurry to enforce the Burmatov Law, hoping it would be quickly repealed. It was not until two or three years after its adoption that regional authorities realized they had to do something to avoid criminal liability.”
In the summer of 2023, Dmitry Kobylkin, chair of the State Duma Committee for Ecology, introduced amendments to the Burmatov Law, offering regions the right to decide for themselves whether they wanted to return captured animals to the streets or arrange for keeping them in custody. Kobylkin insisted that the regions had “independence in addressing the issue” but not a “license to kill the animals.”
Nevertheless, as early as November 2023, the Buryatian parliament passed a law authorizing the killing of animals that were not reclaimed from shelters for more than 30 days. In response, animal rights activists launched an urgent evacuation of dogs from Buryat shelters to other regions. Later on, 16 more Russian regions followed Buryatia's example.
In their efforts to challenge the legality of “euthanasia,” activists went as far as appealing to the Constitutional Court, which clarified that, officially at least, Russia treats the killing of stray animals as a measure of last resort, permissible only in the event of the animals are aggressive or carry dangerous diseases — or if the region faces an “extraordinary situation.” This court ruling had an ambiguous impact. On the one hand, animal rights activists used it to challenge the authorization to kill dogs in Buryatia (albeit only after hundreds of animals had already been killed there) and other regions. On the other hand, the definition of “extraordinary” was left entirely to the discretion of the regional authorities — a loophole they immediately used.
Since the beginning of 2025, an “extraordinary situation” has been in effect in Tyva, as well as in the Astrakhan, Kemerovo, and Orenburg regions. Stavropol may soon join them.
The Novokuznetsk city administration declared an extraordinary situation on the grounds that they had received more than two requests for catching three or more animals in a month. Even though the animals have already been caught and chipped, they still “obstruct the passage of citizens.”
According to Tatiana Snigireva, the director of the shelter “A Chance for Life”, the authorities' debt to the facility has reached 7 million rubles ($90,300). At the end of 2024, funding was cut entirely, and the only remaining option is to release the dogs back onto the streets.
Instead of solving the shelter problem, in late March 2025 the regional government introduced a three-month “anti-dog special operation” throughout Novokuznetsk, authorizing the killing of animals as early as 10 days after their capture.
In Novokuznetsk, dog catchers were given a license to kill dogs 10 days after their capture
In early April, locals discovered several bags filled with dead dogs, dumped in the middle of the road to the Sokolukha Mountain viewpoint. The Kuzbass Veterinary Department promised to remove the slaughtered animals, which the organization referred to as “biological waste.”
Wherever legalized dog killing has begun, animal rights activists have tried to oppose it, both with protests and in court. In the Kemerovo Region, activists put forward a legal challenge to the introduction of the «extraordinary situation regime,” and the court indeed ordered a stop to the killing of healthy animals until June (though the authorities immediately appealed the decision). In the Orenburg Region, a similar lawsuit ended in defeat for animal rights activists.
In the city of Astrakhan and the Privolzhsky district, veterinary authorities have decided to return animals only to their registered owners, thereby preventing volunteers from moving large groups of dogs from shelters to temporary holding facilities.
“Lately, they have ordered to kill animals within 15 days from their capture,” says Oleg Shein, a former federal and regional MP. “Meanwhile, the owner has only 13 days to retrieve their dog. That is, an owner can find their dog still alive, but they may not be able to get it back until it is already dead. There is no logic in this, only ill will, and this ill will has gained power in the Astrakhan Region. Unfortunately, this is not a purely regional initiative. Such policies find broad support at the very top of the ruling class.”
An owner can find their dog still alive, but they may not be able to get it back until it is already dead
In the Astrakhan Region, the problem of stray animals is as acute as it is anywhere else in Russia. At the end of 2023, Astrakhan became Russia's second region, after Buryatia, to legalize the killing of stray animals. The bill was sponsored by Evgeny Dunaev, an MP notorious for his intransigence towards stray dogs and their defenders. But in the summer of 2024, the Sochi-based Third Court of Appeals overturned the Astrakhan “euthanasia” law, finding it to run contrary to federal law.
Presently, some blame “the Burmatov law” for the developments in Astrakhan, while others complain that the money allocated for its implementation was embezzled.
At the end of 2022, animal rights activists found 60 dog corpses with traces of unthinkable torture at a burial ground in Astrakhan's Privolzhsky District. The tags on their ears suggested that the animals had been kept at the EKOPriyut shelter — a regional TNVR program contractor. In March 2025, three EKOPriyut organizers, including former Astrakhan parliament deputy Andrei Nevlyudov, were sentenced to terms ranging from 4.5 to 9 years in prison and fines of 52 million rubles ($657,000) for animal abuse and fraud.
“The previous head of the Astrakhan region, Major General Sergei Morozov, offered all three contracts for the capture and neutering of animals to a private firm that stole 90% of all the allocated money. This is not an exaggeration; it was confirmed by the court verdict,” Shein recalls. “As a result, according to official estimates alone, at least 330 animals died of starvation. That is, they starved captured animals and watched them die, as the administration of the shelter filled their pockets with the money allocated for their subsistence. When it all came to light, there was a terrible scandal, and the current leadership of the Astrakhan region is obsessed with preventing this kind of situation from happening again. But in their understanding, 'preventing' means not restoring order, but on the contrary, abolishing all rules and controls and legalizing total murder.”
While the mass extermination of stray dogs was underway at the regional level, federal legislators made several attempts to finally abolish the ban on killing them. In late February 2025, when a pack of stray dogs in Stavropol Krai mauled a 9-year-old girl, State Duma Chair Vyacheslav Volodin instructed the Duma Committee on Family Affairs to work on protecting the population from dog attacks.
A working group headed by Communist Party deputy Nina Ostanina prepared a bill to abolish the TNVR system in Russia. The bill would prohibit regional authorities from releasing captured animals back onto the streets, allowing them to decide only how long to keep the animals in shelters before putting them down. Ostanina insists that if the regional authorities have the resources, they can keep dogs in a shelter even until their natural death — but in any case, there should be no unsupervised dogs on the street.
“This bill is as bloody as they get,” says animal rights advocate Koretskikh. “It legitimizes the killing of not only dogs but also stray cats. True, it doesn’t explicitly mandate the euthanasia of stray animals — that decision is left to the discretion of regional authorities. However, keeping animals in shelters is expensive, and perhaps only Moscow can afford to spend around a billion rubles on it every year without concern. It’s not hard to imagine that the regions with the most severe stray animal problems — such as the Astrakhan and Irkutsk regions, Buryatia, Tyva, and the northern territories of the Russian Federation — will be the first to take advantage of the situation.”
Some of Ostanina's colleagues were also opposed to the bill. Andrei Klishas, a Senator from the Krasnoyarsk Krai — and no stranger to dog breeding — stated that the adoption of the law is impossible, as it contradicts the position of the Supreme Court. The Federation Council's Constitutional Legislation Committee, which Klishas heads, prepared a negative opinion on the proposal.
The first reading of the bill, originally scheduled for March 19, was postponed indefinitely. However, Ostanina's group continues to come up with even more radical proposals. For example, the MPs want to legislate a ban on feeding stray animals and to introduce fines for obstructing their capture.
A group of Russian MPs wants to legislate a ban on feeding stray animals
The proposal to legalize the killing of stray animals has triggered a wave of protests across Russia, with experts from the Aktivatika project counting more than 50 such rallies in March alone. In many cities, such as those of Kazan, Izhevsk, Chita, Kaliningrad, and Volgograd, anywhere from dozens to hundreds of locals took to the streets.
The largest such rally took place in Blagoveshchensk, attracting about 270 participants. Many came with their pets. The event unfolded peacefully, even if animal rights activists complained about cyberbullying directed at the rally organizers and participants. Similar demonstrations in Novosibirsk and Izhevsk saw crowds of around 200 people each, and Khabarovsk held two rallies, each with hundreds of protesters. In late April, some 150 people protested the killing of stray animals in Chelyabinsk.
In Moscow, hundreds of concerned citizens twice turned up at the Presidential Administration — on March 15 and April 5 — to submit appeals against the Ostanina bill. Residents of St. Petersburg also expressed their collective dissatisfaction, with around 600 residents submitting appeals to the Presidential Reception Office in the Northwestern Federal District. The same pattern followed in Krasnodar, Yekaterinburg, Stavropol, and a dozen other Russian cities.
True, supporters of killing stray animals also held a few rallies. On Jan. 18, Astrakhan saw a demonstration organized by MP Dunaev calling for the declaration of an extraordinary situation in the city. Animal rights activists tried to shout down the advocates of euthanasia, but those calling for a humane solution to the problem were outnumbered.
Another “anti-dog” rally took place on April 6 in Mirny, Yakutia, with several dozen people carrying signs that called for policymakers to prioritize the interests of victims of stray dog attacks and children's right to walk around town in peace and safety.
Two months before the rally, dozens of mutilated dog corpses — with severed paws and traces of gunshot wounds — were found in Mirny. Animal rights activists managed to initiate criminal proceedings.
Regions enjoy more political freedom than the capital, so it is possible to secure authorization for protests — as long as they are not directed against the war, election results, or the local governor. As former Moscow MP Yevgeny Stupin explains:
“The animal protection movement is not that large, but these activists are very attached to animals, seeing them (especially dogs) essentially as their children. And when deputies dare to utter thoughtless statements about the need to shoot dogs, animal rights activists take their words as a call to kill children — and what kind of reaction can there be to infanticide?”
Stupin helped animal rights volunteers protect the Kozhukhovsky shelter, one of the largest in Russia, hosting about 3,000 homeless animals at the time. At the end of 2022, Moscow's authorities decided to move the facility farther away from the city — 40 km outside the Moscow Ring Road and right next door to the Malinki landfill. The official justification was the “lack of space” for animals, but in reality, the government wanted to use the site for a drone factory.
The Kozhukhov animal shelter was moved far beyond the Moscow Ring Road to build a drone factory in its place
Employees of the shelter, along with animal rights volunteers, collected 200,000 signatures on a petition to keep the facility in place, but they did not succeed. In Malinki, the first spring rains flooded the new shelter, and the dogs were forced to stand in icy water up to their ankles.
“Malinki has no public transportation stop, so it takes the volunteers hours to get there. The quality of dog food is poor (the administration is purchasing the cheapest food under Federal Law 44-FZ), and the dogs constantly have diarrhea and are freezing,” Stupin recounts. “Volunteers come there to insulate the cages, and we also gave them a hand, but this is a drop in the ocean, because it is the state's responsibility to deal with such things, not activists! Moscow shelters are overcrowded. Still, the situation in Moscow is incomparably better than in the regions. As Burmatov says: nationwide, only one-quarter of the demand for shelters is met, and 20 regions have no shelters at all. Yakutia faces a colossal problem with shelters, and they have trouble handling the dogs. The outcome is often decided by nature because animals cannot survive in that cold.”
Reports of death camp-style kennels and brutal dog catchers come from all over the country.
- Last year, The Insider's correspondent visited Yakutian orphanages, known nationwide for their cruelty.
- In Kamyshlov, animal rights activists are battling against a blood-curdling shelter, which receives animals from dozens of towns in the Sverdlovsk Region and beyond and brings them to an extreme degree of dehydration and emaciation.
- In the northern town of Pyt-Yakh, activists visited a shelter run by the Shans Autonomous Non-Profit Organization. They found burnt dog skulls and pigs living in enclosures instead of dogs. Only after two years of struggle did they manage to rescue 180 animals from the facility’s director, Alexander Goryntsev.
- In the Buryat town of Gusinoozersk, volunteers found only a handful of barely alive animals in bare enclosures without bowls or straw, along with dozens of dog corpses piled in an animal burial ground — instead of the 71 dogs the UK-3 company was supposed to neuter and release, according to the paperwork.
- In Stavropol, dogs soiled with their own feces were “temporarily” kept in the forest in cramped, unsheltered cages. The contractor did not allow volunteers to take them away.
RBC's analysis showed that the prices for dog food and veterinary drugs for captured animals, stipulated in municipal contracts, have not been indexed to account for inflation. Firms that provide adequate care have little hope of breaking even financially.
These conditions encourage the emergence of regional monopolies, in which tenders are always won by the supplier with the lowest contract price, regardless of the methods they use to extract profit. Koretskikh describes this approach as the main pitfall of the national TNVR program.
“For instance, contractors do not catch dogs at all or only capture those that approach the dog hunter voluntarily — that is, the most friendly and socialized animals — while ignoring truly dangerous packs. Animals are being slaughtered. They are abducted from the streets of cities and towns and never returned to their capture sites. On paper, their numbers are being overstated. They are not neutered: it is not uncommon for a dog that has just been released from the TNVR system to have puppies. And all this is possible because local authorities turn a blind eye to any violations and say: take these dogs away and ditch them somewhere in the forest or the field — do whatever it takes to get rid of them.”
Contractors often capture dogs that approach the dog hunter voluntarily — that is, the friendliest and the most socialized animals
Entrepreneurs cut costs on food and anesthesia used for neutering, and Koretskikh fears that if dog killing were legalized, they would be trying to cut “euthanasia” costs as well. This means animals could be injected with a lethal drug without anesthesia and could die painfully while fully conscious — or they could be killed by other barbaric methods.
Fortunately, unscrupulous contractors do not always go unpunished. In February 2025, the Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service for Tatarstan listed entrepreneur Sergey Madyankin as an unethical service provider. Since 2018, Madyankin has won municipal tenders in Ulyanovsk and neighboring regions — and sowed hatred and fear everywhere he went.
Animal rights activists accused Madyankin of kidnapping dogs — stray and domestic alike — off the street, subjecting them to agonizing death by shooting them with darts, imitating spaying by making incisions in the abdominal region of females, using expired vaccines, and receiving duplicate payments for the same animal under contracts from multiple regional governments.
Madyankin himself denies the allegations. The antimonopoly agency discovered, however, that the entrepreneur had been transporting animals across regions for many hours in wooden “coffins” instead of appropriately sized cages. This type of container, in which dogs could neither sit down nor stretch out normally, was considered a breach of contract.
Animal rights activist Koretskikh notes that a moratorium on business inspections, in place until 2030, has made it very difficult to get the prosecutor's office to react to violations. As a result, fighting anyone who decides to monetize animal abuse takes years and requires numerous complaints and appeals to the authorities.
And yet, as former MP Shein describes the situation, the authorities’ brutal, cost-cutting approach does have a positive side:
“Adopted in the typical rushed fashion of United Russia, the Burmatov law left room for corruption and gave rise to occasional high-profile embezzlement cases, which officials detested. However, for all the drawbacks, this law worked: the number of attacks on people by stray animals has been decreasing. Even in the Astrakhan Region, where the situation with stray dogs is very problematic, the number of attacks in 2024 decreased by one-quarter.”
Still, Moscow MP Stupin emphasizes that no one in their right mind denies the existence of a widespread stray dog problem in Russia. However, he rejects the idea that violent solutions are the answer, proposing instead to introduce compulsory registration of dogs. Under such an arrangement, owners who fail to comply could be fined, and those who abandon their pets would face punishment.
“When no work is being done and shelters are scarce, it is foolish to expect that no one will get bitten. But the dogs are not to blame, and much less the animal rights defenders. It is the responsibility of MPs who are not passing relevant laws. You won't find any stray dogs on the street in Germany: they are all placed in shelters there. True, you could say that Germany is a rich country. But take Armenia, which is much poorer than Russia. Armenia has no money for shelters, so dogs are processed and released into the streets. As practice shows, once fed and socialized, these animals pose no danger to the public. Children, including my own, play with these dogs.”
Stupin suggests that Russia could combine the experience of Europe and post-Soviet republics: in warm regions like the Caucasus and Kuban, dogs could be allowed to roam freely on the streets with tags in their ears, while in colder regions they could be placed in shelters.
The goal of animal advocates is to get the authorities to finally stop fighting stray animals and to focus on the people who throw these animals out onto the street. One in three respondents in the All-Russian Census survey cite the inaccessibility of shelters as a barrier to adopting a pet from among strays. Therefore, creating a convenient shelter system and a publicly available neutering program could reduce the size of the “stray army” — but doing so would require political will.
Animal advocates seek to get the authorities to finally stop fighting stray animals and to focus on the people who throw these animals out onto the street
As the authorities dither, society is attempting to find solutions of its own. In Orenburg, an NGO called “We Found You a Friend” has been neutering domestic and stray animals. Organized by animal rights activist Tatiana Romanova in the summer of 2024 in response to the law on euthanasia, We Found You a Friend won a tender for capturing strays — and refused to kill any of them.
Animal advocates have declared on social media that until the “slaughter law” is repealed, they will continue to rescue, care for, and foster dogs, making sure that no animal is put to death.
Russia's animal protection movement is expanding, discovering new methods as the struggle continues. Activists look beyond the fate of dogs and cats, also expressing concern about animal abuse in circuses and menageries. The Alliance of Animal Advocates recently made a public service advertisement: a cartoon about a bear cub named Plush who would rather live in the forest with his mother than sit in a cramped cage and follow the cruel instructions of a trainer. The PSA is shown in public transportation across Russia and is aimed at raising questions regarding the ethics of using trained animals in circus performances.
Minor victories have already been achieved. Activists have been quite successful in weaning Russians off the custom of releasing specially purchased birds on Annunciation Day. As animal advocates explain, this tradition encourages cruelty and poaching. While releasing forest birds into the wild may sound like an act of kindness, they should not be caught in the first place. For many years, activists have been traveling to Voronezh on every Annunciation Day. In 2019, 230 birds were seized from street vendors near cathedrals, but by 2025, only 11 birds needed to be rescued.
Animal rights defenders are also fighting street photographers, training stations for hunting dogs, and petting zoos, some of which operate without a license and even sell their animals on classifieds websites for meat. Meanwhile, the war is getting in the way: as levels of aggression in society rise, some people believe that it is the right moment to deal with stray animals “once and for all” — and to deal with those who dare defend them in a similar manner.
MP Yevgeny Dunaev urged residents of the Astrakhan Region to appeal to Vladimir Putin to have animal protection organizations recognized as foreign agents. At a rally he organized in Astrakhan, speakers demanded that taxpayers' money be spent on drones for the army instead of on the humane treatment of stray dogs. Meanwhile, in Yakutia, Public Chamber member Ulyana Vinokurova recently called for adopting a “wartime” approach to stray animals: “It doesn't matter if it's a megacity, Yakutsk, the town of Neryungi, or a tiny village. We must abandon all care for them. They must be destroyed.”
Astrakhan MP urged to recognize all animal protection organizations as foreign agents
“After February 2022, the situation for animal advocates has certainly gone downhill,” Koretskikh complains. “When the economic crisis began, it became clear that the state no longer cared about animal problems, because they require not only organizational but also financial investments. Shelters stopped being built, and the state decided to take the path of least resistance — that is, killing. Alternatives to animal testing in cosmetics have also become problematic due to sanctions. In fact, work in all areas has either stopped or has become several times harder.”
The activist also complains that Moscow and St. Petersburg still have a ban on mass events introduced because of COVID-19. In November 2023, Koretskikh himself spent 10 days in jail for protesting outside the Bolshoi Moscow Circus with stills from a video in which people resembling the Zapashny brothers train tigers by beating them, hosing them with water, and throwing metal pedestals at them. Askold Zapashny called those distributing the video “crazy liberals,” and his younger brother Edgard wrote on his Telegram channel that Koretskikh is a member of the Ukrainian Right Sector organization. Koretskikh filed a lawsuit to defend his honor, dignity, and business reputation, but the court rejected it.
Still, Koretskikh is optimistic: “True, people have been so intimidated that they are afraid to say a word, not to mention to engage in civil activism. In such a setting, it's easy for the authorities to promote unpopular measures. Yet, as recent events have shown, the animal protection movement remains a force to be reckoned with.”