License to kill. How the bill authorizing the slaughter of stray animals galvanized Russia’s animal rights movement

“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 Many municipalities were in no hurry to enforce the Burmatov Law, hoping it would be quickly repealed.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.