By Gleb Bryanski
MOSCOW, April 20 – A provincial agriculture official in Siberia was sacked on Monday after protests by farmers against the culling of cattle went viral on the internet, in rare criticism of the authorities that has been acknowledged by the Kremlin.
The Novosibirsk regional governor, Andrei Travnikov, said he had fired the region’s agriculture minister, Andrei Shindelov, over his handling of cattle disease.
“For the first time in many decades, we have allowed dangerous animal diseases into the region,” Travnikov was quoted as telling local officials on the regional government’s Telegram channel.
Novosibirsk farmers had protested in March after police and vets culled thousands of cattle. The protests were among issues brought up in a viral video by a social media influencer who lives abroad, Viktoria Bonya, who said that Russians were being squeezed by corrupt officials and might one day erupt.
Her appeal, which received tens of millions of views, was acknowledged this week by the Kremlin and sparked a nationwide discussion on social media about the state of affairs in wartime Russia.
“They came and killed the cattle. If someone started to speak up, they took them to the police so that the others didn’t dare,” said Bonya.
The farmers’ protests were largely ignored by state media but were extensively covered by popular influencers. In one video that went viral, Svetlana Panina, a farmer from the village of Novoklyuchi, chased Shindelov through the corridors of a local administration building saying she would soon not be able to eat or pay her bills.
The protests died down after some of the activists were briefly detained and the government promised compensation to affected farmers.
The authorities described the culling last month as a means to combat outbreaks of two veterinary diseases: pasteurellosis and rabies, although some biologists cast doubt on whether those diseases would have required such widespread culling.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service in a report published last month cited “local sources and trading contacts” who said “the scale of these measures may indicate an unconfirmed outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease”.
The Russian agriculture watchdog agency told Reuters that allegations in the USDA report “were not true.”
(Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
