Out of the woods A Siberian tiger broke into his cabin and ripped off his arm. Then the cousin who saved him was prosecuted for poaching.
In February 2023, 19-year-old Sergey Kyalundzyuga and his 23-year-old cousin Alexander Sigde set off for a fishing trip in the Russian taiga. At the end of the day, they settled into the rudimentary winter cabin where they planned to spend the night. Late in the evening, Sergey heard a noise outside. As soon as he turned to look out the window, an Amur tiger leapt through the door, knocking him to the ground. By the time Alexander grabbed his rifle and shot the animal, it had already torn off his cousin’s arm. In the days that followed, police accused Alexander of provoking the attack by firing at the tiger earlier in the forest, and in May 2025, an appeals court convicted him of killing an endangered species. It wasn’t the first time the state had taken a tiger’s side over a human’s in such a confrontation; on the contrary, Vladimir Putin has adopted tiger preservation as one of his pet causes. Meduza shares an abridged translation of a joint report from the outlets Novaya Vkladka and Govorit NeMoskva on the tension between tiger conservation and human life in Russia’s Far East.
‘They slipped me a piece of paper’
For a long time after he was discharged from the hospital, Sergey Kyalundzyuga would tuck his empty left sleeve into his pocket to create the illusion of a full arm. He kept his face hidden under a hood so no one would recognize him. These days, he pays no mind to the sideways glances from passersby, and he even makes jokes about his missing limb.
Sergey is a short guy in black sneakers and a gray T-shirt with the left sleeve hanging loose. A friend laced up the shoes for Sergey about a year ago, and he hasn’t untied them since; it’s not easy to do with one hand. Explaining why his hand is rough to the touch, he says he’s been lifting weights to build strength in his remaining arm.
Sergey lives in Luchegorsk, a coastal village in Russia’s far-eastern Primorsky Krai. He moved here in September 2024 to “get away from everyone” — including the tigers.
Two years ago, in early 2023, Sergey, his cousin Alexander, and three other relatives rode snowmobiles from Arsenyevo, his home village in Russia’s Far Eastern Khabarovsk Krai, to Anyuysky National Park, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) away. After a day of fishing, Sergey and Alexander packed their fish into bags, which their other relatives took home by snowmobile.
Sergey says he wasn’t there just for the fishing. He wanted to distract himself from the death of his father, who had been killed the previous year in a tree-cutting accident. “I thought I’d find some peace in the taiga, make some money from the fish, and pull myself together,” Sergey explains. He was studying welding at a local college and had started working part-time already. After his father’s death, it fell to him to support his two younger sisters, younger brother, and disabled mother.
Sergey jokes that he once ran away from a reporter because “my lawyer banned me from talking to the press.” Discussing the tiger attack is still hard for him. He says he had a bad feeling that day and hadn’t wanted to go to the forest. “But on the other hand,” he says, “if it hadn’t been me, someone else might have died.”
Around 11:00 p.m. on February 12, Sergey heard a noise on the roof but assumed it was the cat they’d brought from home to catch rats in the hut. On the attic floor lay their last sack of fish, which hadn’t fit on their relatives’ snowmobile. “Did you hear that?” he asked his cousin, who was lying on the bed. Sergey pulled back the curtain — “and there it was, this huge head.” A tiger had jumped right through the window, shattering the glass.
“I was lucky I managed to put my arm up. It bit into my shoulder — it was going for my neck — and clawed me across the back,” Sergey says, pulling down his T-shirt collar to show the dent between his shoulder blades. “Alexander ran out, grabbed the rifle hanging by the door, and shot the tiger point blank in the head.”
Sergey’s cousin tied a tourniquet around Sergey’s upper arm, laid him on the bed, and turned on the TV to help distract him. There was no cell signal in the woods, so Alexander set off to find their uncle, Mikhail, who was staying in another hut 10 kilometers (six miles) away. Mikhail helped carry Sergey to his warmer cabin, then headed for the main road to find cell service. The snowmobile had broken down in the forest, so Mikhail had to ski nearly 45 kilometers (28 miles) through untouched snow to get help.
Sergey wasn’t airlifted to the hospital in Khabarovsk until February 14. By then, he had multiple broken ribs and a collapsed lung. He’d lost two liters of blood, and the wound where his arm had been torn off was badly infected.
“When I opened my eyes, I was already on a stretcher in the hospital. Photographers and journalists were flashing lights right in my face — it was awful. I blacked out again, and came to when my mom walked in. I could barely sit up, and that’s when I realized my arm was gone. I cried for a week straight,” Sergey recalls.
Later, he learned that before the attack, the tiger had ransacked several other cabins nearby, including one where it broke down a door, and another where it tore apart a foam mattress.
In March, a man and a woman in police uniforms came to visit Sergey in the hospital.
“They took advantage of a moment when my mom had stepped out to buy groceries,” Sergey says.
They walked right into my room and started asking me what happened. I told them, but they didn’t believe me. I thought they were writing down what I said, but then they slipped me a paper with the investigators’ version of events. Stupid me didn’t realize what it was, and I signed it.
The investigators claimed that Kyalundzyuga and Sigde had been poaching, and that Alexander had shot the tiger in the forest before the attack. Several days later, the wounded and enraged animal attacked Sergey, they alleged. The case files say that Alexander killed the attacking predator, but they don’t clarify where the attack took place or how the tiger ended up in the cabin. Nor do they clarify whether the cousins, one of whom was by then missing an arm and bleeding heavily, dragged the dead animal there themselves. Nevertheless, the accusation of illegal hunting became the foundation of the case against Alexander and Sergey.
‘Tigger has to eat something’
In Luchegorsk, where Sergey Kyalundzyuga now lives, images of tigers are everywhere: a bright green topiary shaped like a predator on the central square, a handmade bench with a stylized tiger on it, a display board reminding residents how important it is to protect the rare animal. The Amur tiger is a source of pride in the Russian Far East, but in recent years, it’s also become a major danger to the region’s residents. The endangered big cats have been killing dogs, cows, and horses in villages. Occasionally, they also attack people.
Tigers are rare in Luchegorsk itself. The last time locals spotted one was this winter — about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from town, near an active coal mine where workers feed stray dogs. One of the dogs crawled under an excavator with its tail between its legs when a tiger and her cubs passed nearby.
Nearly everyone this story’s authors talk to in the town has a story about what happens when people cross paths with these predators. And all the stories seem to have the same conclusion: that the state hasn’t just failed to solve the problem, it’s openly taken the tigers’ side — even when the encounters turn deadly.
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“If someone defends themselves and kills an animal, not only do they get hit with a million-ruble fine, they also get taken to court. I know two guys whose cabin was attacked by a tiger — one of them died, and the other shot the tiger. He got fined one and a half million rubles ($19,000) and sentenced to a year and a half in prison,” says a local man named Alexey. “Poachers shoot at the tigers, sometimes just wounding them, and that’s why they attack. Plus, they’re starving — hunters have killed all the game, so there’s nothing left to eat in the forest.”
Tamara is a pensioner from the nearby village of Verkhniy Pereval. Like many in the Russian Far East, she refers to the striped predator as “Tigger.” This year, she says, the big cats have snatched several dogs off their chains in her village.
“One Tigger settled near [the town of] Bikin, and another Tigger came from [the village of] Alchan. They split our village between them. And you’re not allowed to kill them! They just drag off the dogs every winter like it’s nothing,” she says.
Tamara says the tiger problem in Verkhniy Pereval got much worse three or four years ago, after African swine fever (ASF) swept through Primorsky Krai and wiped out much of the wild boar population. “People would go mushroom picking and come back saying the forest was littered with boar carcasses,” she recalls. “And Tigger has to eat something.”
Tamara also remembers a man who hit a tiger with his car and called the police. “They fined him,” she says. “What was he supposed to do — drive into a ditch just to avoid hitting the tiger?”
At a local cafeteria, a ruddy-faced coal miner named Andrey launches into a story about a tiger as he’s sneaks what appears to be cognac into a glass of fruit compote. The moment the topic of tigers comes up, he launches into a story about how a friend of his had to stand guard at night with a rifle to protect his horse at a nearby dacha settlement — because “Tigger was prowling around.” Another friend actually had to shoot one, he says:
He told me, “It’s one thing that it ate all the dogs. But when it lunged at my wife, I shot it.” They hit him with a multi-million-ruble fine and sent him to prison. I think he did the right thing. But [Primorsky Krai Governor Oleg] Kozhemyako says, “You can’t touch the tigers!” And God forbid you kill one — they’ll throw you in jail.
In Andrey’s view, the tigers have started venturing into villages because of deforestation.
“Personally, I blame Moscow,” he says. “The people at the very top.”
‘It roared and my legs gave out’
In the village of Arsenyevo in the Khabarovsk region, where Sergey and Alexander used to live, locals have had their own close calls with tigers. The most recent run-in happened in December 2024, when a big cat attacked two dogs belonging to a local Udege woman named Nadezhda Kyalundiga. Her house sits on the edge of the village, near the forest, and she works at the local grocery store. Standing behind the counter, she recounts the story with something close to a laugh. Still, she says that for a while afterward, even the sound of passing cars would make her flinch.
“My husband was working the night shift, and around three in the morning, I hear footsteps. One of the dogs, Amur, suddenly barks, then goes quiet. Then the second one, Jackie, the little guy, starts howling — ‘Woo-oo-oo!’ And then nothing. Silence,” Nadezhda says.
It was pitch black outside, and she was too scared to go out alone, so she went back to bed. In the morning, she found Amur’s torn-up body in the yard. Jackie was nowhere to be seen. She headed to the shed to check on the cow and calf.
“I’d almost made it to the shed when I heard this deep growl. I thought, am I imagining this? Then — it roared. My legs just gave out. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I don’t even remember how I crawled back to the house,” she recalls.
Nadezhda called the Arsenyevo village administration. When wildlife inspectors arrived, the tiger was still in the hayloft, finishing off Jackie the dog. As soon as it noticed movement, the tiger leapt down and lunged at one of the inspectors. He managed to fire a flare, but it didn’t scare the animal off. The second inspector hesitated to shoot, afraid he’d hit his partner.
“The guy was screaming, just screaming. I had to cover my ears, I was so scared! He ended up firing six shots. He said if he’d tried to use a tranquilizer, the tiger would’ve mauled his partner before the drug kicked in. The thing’s face was massive, but the body was skinny, mangy, just terrifying,” Nadezhda says. She then recalls treating the injured inspector’s wounds with hydrogen peroxide: his lips had turned blue, and his “face was as white as chalk.”
After the tiger attack, Nadezhda’s husband walked her to work every day for a month.
According to locals, tigers have always lived near Arsenyevo, but before the winter of 2022–2023, they didn’t go after dogs. Like people in Luchegorsk, residents here blame African swine fever, which wiped out much of the wild boar population and left tigers with nothing to eat.
“They’re weak, totally exhausted,” says Nadezhda’s husband Igor. “The one they killed, its tail was chewed off. Other tigers must have attacked it and driven it off their territory.”
He believes the tigers coming near settlements are connected to the logging of the taiga, which is being sold to China. “What are they cutting down? Oak. And oak is what wild boars feed on. If the food base keeps shrinking every year, then why the hell are you breeding tigers? I’ve told this to two, maybe three reporters already,” Igor fumes.
Tiger territory
Residents of small villages in the taiga of Primorsky Krai and Khabarovsk Krai have effectively become hostages to the tigers: killing the animals is prohibited, but what to do when a predator threatens a person is unclear. As the people of Arsenyevo have learned, even talking publicly about tiger attacks is frowned upon.
“We don’t even know how we’re supposed to behave. These groups like the Amur Tiger Center, they started pressuring us. They told us not to post anything online,” says Nadezhda. “When the police showed up, they asked about our social media photos, [saying,] ‘Why did you share this?’”
At the Arsenyevo municipal council office, village head Igor Lonchakov is clearly not thrilled to see journalists.
“Why are you even doing this? We dealt with this two years ago — five reporters visited back then. What, are we seeing a sudden surge in tiger attacks?” he says. “I’m a biologist, and I know this: not a single woman or child has ever been attacked by a tiger. That case with the Kyalundzyuga and Sigde brothers? That happened out in the taiga. They were hunters, and that was tiger territory. But an attack on a person in a village? Name one. You won’t.”
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So far, there have indeed been no recorded tiger attacks on people in Arsenyevo itself. But in the winter of 2023, before a tiger bit off Sergey Kyalundzyuga’s arm, several predators were spotted prowling the village’s outskirts. “My husband was heading to the bus stop — and a tiger ran right past him!” says Nadezhda, the grocery store clerk.
That same year, a dog was mauled under the porch of a house in Arsenyevo. Another tiger was captured at a beekeeping site near the village. A third — a young, starving female — found a pan with food scraps left by workers and got her tongue stuck to the frozen metal. By the time she tore herself free, the snow around her was spotted with blood. Later, when a snowmobile passed by and a seat cushion fell off, the emaciated animal tore that the shreds too. Game wardens tranquilized the tiger to move her deeper into the forest, but she was so weak that she never woke up, according to Dmitry Kyalundzyuga, Sergey’s uncle and the local representative of the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) in Arsenyevo.
Over the past year, tiger attacks in the Russian Far East have mostly occurred not in villages themselves, but just outside of them. In fall 2024, a tiger dragged a logging worker into the taiga and mauled him near the Khabarovsk village of Solontsovy. In December, another tiger broke a man’s ribs while he was vacationing at a glamping site in Anyuysky National Park — his wife and children narrowly escaped. In spring 2025, a forester was killed by a tiger in Primorsky Krai.
At a recent scientific conference in Moscow, Amur Tiger Center Director Sergey Aramilev emphasized that fatal encounters with Amur tigers are extremely rare: from 2010 to 2024, there were only 20 recorded attacks, seven of which ended in death. In all cases, he said, humans were to blame:
Gunshot wounds or other injuries inflicted by people provoke aggression in tigers. Also, pursuing the animal — when it’s defending itself, its cubs, or its kill — can lead to an attack. The two recent cases in 2025 fit the same pattern: both tigers had multiple gunshot wounds. So this idea that tigers show unprovoked aggression towards humans is a myth, found only in inaccurate online stories.
‘They wouldn’t have let us go otherwise’
The Udege community in Arsenyevo doesn’t believe the authorities’ claim that Sergey Sergey Kyalundzyuga and Alexander Sigde provoked the tiger attack by hunting it. Lyubov Odzhal, the head of RAIPON in Khabarovsk Krai, insists that the Udege don’t engage in poaching at all: their traditions and beliefs don’t allow it. Then there’s the fact that Sigde and his cousin were both young and inexperienced hunters who had been taken into the taiga by older relatives.
Odzhal says Sigde’s relatives told her that from March 11 to 13, 2023, nearly everyone who’d gone into the forest with him was taken in for police questioning and released only late at night for a few hours, then brought back in early the next morning. According to Sigde’s defense attorney, Alexander Zasukhin, there was indeed a long interrogation from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m., but it only happened once. Odzhal believes this is why Sigde’s uncle, Mikhail, told his nephew to go along with the investigators’ account and take the blame: “Otherwise they wouldn’t have let us go.”
Sigde declined to comment for this story, and his uncle Mikhail didn’t respond to requests.
Sigde now faces two criminal charges: illegal hunting of a protected species and illegal possession of a firearm. According to Sergey Kyalundzyuga, the gun his cousin used to shoot the tiger had been left in the winter cabin by Uncle Mikhail, in case of a bear attack.
Both Odzhal and Zasukhin point to inconsistencies in the prosecution’s version of events — particularly the confusion over how many bullets were found in the tiger, and the fact that no blood traces were found at the site in the forest where Alexander and Sergey had been. Zasukhin also argues that a licensed veterinarian should have conducted the forensics on the tiger, which were instead done by Sergey Aramilev, the director of the Amur Tiger Center, who’s a biologist by training. In court, Zasukhin called Aramilev a “party with a conflict of interest,” arguing that the tiger was starving, and the lack of food in the forest is the center’s responsibility. When Zasukhin attempted to bring in an independent expert from Irkutsk, the court rejected the motion.
According to Aramilev’s report, Alexander Sigde had fired at the tiger several days before the attack on his brother. On the day of the attack, he reportedly shot the animal from about 10 meters away, hitting its neck, then shot it in the head at least twice during the ensuing struggle. After a polygraph test, Sigde told police he had fired at the tiger earlier because he was frightened and wanted to scare it off. But people in the village believe this testimony was coerced.
Regardless of whether Sigde fired at the tiger before the attack or not, Zasukhin stresses that the poaching allegations were never proven. “They’re saying [Sigde] was hunting. But to prove that somebody was poaching, you need evidence that they intentionally searched for, tracked, and pursued the animal with the goal of capturing it for personal use. There was none of that,” he says.
In January 2025, a court in Khabarovsk Krai sentenced Alexander Sigde to two years and two months of community service, with 10 percent of his wages withheld for the state, and a fine of 2.6 million rubles ($33,000). He was also banned from leaving the Nanai district for a year. On May 20, the Khabarovsk regional court reviewed his appeal and slightly reduced the sentence, cutting the term of community service to one year. The ruling has not yet taken effect, as Sigde’s lawyer plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.
‘It’s like a tiger’s life matters more than a human’s’
Lyubov Odzyal believes the prosecution’s bias in the case against Alexander Sigde is the result of the Amur Tiger Center’s lobbying. The Russian Geographical Society founded the center in 2013 at Vladimir Putin’ initiative, with the mission of protecting and growing the population of the endangered predator.
Dmitry Kyalundzyuga from Arsenyevo shares this view, arguing that the case is politically motivated:
Look at who sits on the board of the Russian Geographical Society. A regular Udege guy like Alexander could never win in court, because the state doesn’t lose court cases. Especially not now, when even a hint of dissent isn’t tolerated. It used to be different — there was international recourse, people could take things to court outside the country.
When asked to comment on the RAIPON representatives’ criticism and the inconsistencies in the forensic report he authored, the Amur Tiger Center’s director, Sergey Aramilev, responded: “The court has determined who is responsible. If anyone disagrees with the actions of law enforcement or others, there are legal avenues to pursue.”
Dmitry Kyalundzyuga suspects that reports sent to Vladimir Putin about Amur tigers present a distorted view that always blames humans for attacks, though he acknowledges that “maybe the president genuinely has good intentions when it comes to protecting the tiger.”
“Can they really not figure out why the tigers are coming out [of the forest]?” he asks. “Everyone wants to save the tiger, but Indigenous people shouldn’t be turned into scapegoats.”
Zoologist Viktor Lukarevsky agrees. He’s been studying big cats since 1984 and now serves as a scientific secretary at the Perm Zoo. He believes the tiger population in the Russian Far East is severely weakened by food shortages — and that within a few years, up to 90 percent of the endangered cats in the region could disappear.
The 2021–2022 outbreak of African swine fever, he says, only worsened an already dire situation. The real damage comes from deforestation in the Ussuri Taiga and increasing hunting quotas for wild boar and red deer, both of which are key food sources for tigers. Reintroducing boars to the forest hasn’t worked, Lukarevsky says, because most of them lack immunity to swine fever. Without a vaccine, another outbreak is likely. In some parts of Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai, red deer are now the only food tigers have left.
“How are we ‘protecting’ tigers when we’re destroying their habitat?” he says. “I’d like to see how you’d survive if your home was destroyed, if you couldn’t work, couldn’t earn a living, couldn’t find food. How would you reproduce, how would you feel? And yet, everywhere we’re told that the tiger is doing just fine.”
Indeed, Russian media regularly reports that Amur tigers are “under solid protection,” that their population is growing, including in Khabarovsk Krai, and that Vladimir Putin has personally thanked the Amur Tiger Center for its efforts.
But according to Lukarevsky, tigers are naturally cautious animals. If there were enough prey in the forest, they wouldn’t come near human settlements. Hunger, he says, changes their behavior. And the center’s refusal to acknowledge the problem only fuels public anger — anger that often turns not against the officials, but against the animals themselves. “It’s like a tiger’s life matters more to the state than a human’s,” he says.
‘A person wakes up, steps outside to use the toilet, and he’s gone’
Sergey Kyalundzyaga still flinches at the slightest rustle when walking through the forest at dusk. “At first, I kept dreaming about the tiger. I couldn’t sleep at night — I had to take sedatives,” he says.
Like many locals, Sergey still has no clue how to defend himself from tigers without breaking the law. “A person wakes up, steps outside to use the toilet, and that’s it, he’s gone,” he laments.
When phantom pain kicks in, he stands in front of the mirror to remind his brain that his arm is gone. He’s already learned to cook and dress himself with one hand, but some everyday tasks remain a struggle. “The hardest part is tying a hat on my kid. The saddest part is, I can’t fish anymore,” Sergey explains.
Sergey lives with his girlfriend and their two children, two-year-old Katya and seven-month-old Zakhar, who was named after a friend killed in the war in Ukraine. The family makes do with his disability pension of 20,000 rubles (about $220) and child benefits. He hasn’t been able to find a job. “As soon as they see I’ve only got one arm, they’re like, ‘Nope, we don’t hire people like that. No disabled workers,’” he says.
Alexander Sigde left Arsenyevo for a while but later returned. In May, he and his wife had their second child. Whether he’s currently employed is unclear; his relatives mention only the occasional odd job. Alexander’s mother, Irina Sigde, says her son can’t sleep properly. “He can’t fall asleep next to the forest. He tosses and turns all night. His psychiatrist prescribed him pills, but he says they don’t help,” she explains.
Lyubov Odzhal says bitterly that for many Indigenous people, this story hits close to home, since it suggests that in the eyes of the state, they have fewer rights than animals:
Everyone understands that today it was those two boys, and tomorrow it could be me or anyone else. Someone heads out to the winter hut, and a tiger attacks and kills them. And then the media will report that the person shot at the tiger first, so they don’t count as a victim.
According to the 2021 census, there were just 1,325 Udege people left in the Russian Far East, and their numbers have been steadily declining over the past 30 years. At the same time, the Amur tiger population stood at just over 750 and had been growing consistently for three decades.
Original story by Kira Rakusa for Novaya Vkladka and Govorit NeMoskva