RUSSIA: Russian wildlife defenders celebrated a rare victory over international smugglers this week, after customs officers found some 800 paws from an endangered bear species and thousands of animal skins in a truck heading for China.
Border officials and ecologists said the haul of products from rare and endangered creatures was their biggest in a decade, and included body parts from tens of thousands of individual animals, most of them hunted illegally in Russia's wild and remote Far East.
Paws and internal organs from more than 190 endangered Himalayan black bears, including cubs, were found with the rest of the contraband under boxes of food as the truck and its Chinese driver tried to cross Russia's often lightly guarded frontier with its southern neighbour.
"It's just brazen, it wasn't even covered properly. It was just hidden under rubbish and food," said Mr Valery Karpov, deputy head of customs in the Ussuriisk region where Russia, China and North Korea converge.
Officials valued the haul - which included more than 5,500 fur pelts, and antlers and organs that are highly prized in Chinese medicine and cooking - at some $20 million.
"We can only suppose that this amount of cargo was accumulated over a long period of time, and that they were preparing a big batch," said Mr Alexander Vorobyov, head of customs in the Ussuriisk.
Well-organised and ruthless mafia groups control smuggling in the area, and have little trouble enlisting locals to hunt for them in the forest for rare plants and animals that can fetch a small fortune in China. Ginseng, and pelts and organs from the endangered Amur tiger and leopard, are particularly sought after.
"We managed to uncover just a small link in the chain that is destroying the Far East's wildlife," said Mr Sergei Bereznyuk, chief of the Phoenix ecological fund based in Vladivostok, the largest city in the region.
"In order to assemble so much, the smugglers had to set up delivery points all over the region and hire many hunters," he said.
One of the world's last great wildernesses, Russia's Far East was never tamed by the mining and logging teams dispatched to the region in Soviet times, and is still home to dozens of unique animal and plant species, many of which are critically endangered.