In August 2021, wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh set off on an expedition to explore Russia's Chukchi Sea, one of the easternmost regions on the planet, with the hope of capturing images of polar bears on Wrangel Island, a UNESCO nature reserve. After travelling for over 2000 km along Russia's Northern coast, Kokh and his team halted at the unpopulated Kolyuchin Island, assuming this to be their final stop before the arduous trek to Wrangel.

Kolyuchin was once home to a Soviet weather station, accompanied by a small village on the sea's edge, which had both fallen into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent desertion of the site in 1992. However, it swiftly became apparent to Kokh that this miniscule island had a new lease on mammal life; between the fog and within the decrepit buildings came sightings of polar bears. 

In all, roughly twenty of these animals inhabited the village at the time of the shoot, peering out of windows, surveying their property from front porches, and relaxing upon front lawns, unmown for thirty years. 

Upon later examination of the pictures by Anatoly Kochnev, an esteemed professor of Biological Problems of the North at the Russian Academy of Sciences, this fantastic ecological discovery was muffled by a forlorn truth. It was concluded that one of the key reasons why the bears had culminated on the island, and especially within the neglected edifices, was to protect themselves from human hunting. In January 2016, WWF-Russia published a joint study by Kochnev himself and the University of Alaska's Anthropological Expert, Eduard Zdor, which aimed to cover the 'Harvest and use of polar bears in Chukotka [the easternmost federal subject - or 'Okrug' - of Russia]' between 1957 and 2012. They found that the number of polar bears killed in the region with a permit had decreased by more than 10% during this period, and the figure slaughtered without a permit had risen by 10%. Furthermore, between 1957 and 1991, 11% of polar bear sightings would see the animals left alone, whereas, between 92 and 2012, the number had dropped to less than 4% which signifies a general increase in hostility towards the species. 

Russia was a hotbed of polar bear trade and poaching from the 1600s, into the late 1970s, but the Soviet Union, to their credit, was one of the first countries in the Arctic Circle to ban the hunting of polar bears, in 1956, followed by the United States sixteen years later. The true perpetrator of the recent polar bear population plummet can be found less than 800 miles from Russia's Bering strait: Canada.

The Great White North facilitates the international trade of polar bear skins to this day, with provincial governments purchasing wares from indigenous peoples and distributing them to other nations, with similarly lenient policies on the commerce of such items. One of these states is China, whose elite were wooed by government owned 'Fur Canada,' after the company flaunted their commodities at the Chinese International Expo in Shanghai, in late 2018. Canada has set quotas upon the hunting of all 13 bear species in the Northern region of the country, but this figure is not set using accurate calculations of bear population, but rather by the 'requirements' of local groups. This lack of scientific stringency suggests that the government does not have as much of a grasp on the extent of the extermination as they imply, with a staggering 3,262 polar bear skins exported from Canada between 2006 and 2015. That amounts to more than 16% of today's global polar bear population estimates.  

Even more damning is the trophy hunting which still permeates Canadian culture, with companies such as Quality Hunts charging nearly $40,000 for fifteen day hunting trips to murder polar bears in Jones Sound, Qikiqtaaluk. These schemes, alongside other hunting competitions across the country, have resulted in the death of nearly 5000 bears over the past decade. Quality Hunts also offer a '95% [kill] success rate,' only feasible thanks to their utilisation of local Inuit guides. Corporations such as these, which are only permitted due to lazy and profit-driven policies, both line the pockets of greedy CEOs, and incite aboriginal  people to sell their legitimate licences to the ultra-rich, some of whom perceive polar bears as merely a conversation starter, or as another thing to own, rather than living beings.  

Despite Dmitry Kokh's stills being some of the most highly regarded pieces of natural photography this year, the polar bears on Kolyuchin should also act as an admonishment: world governments need to make a change, before 400 years of brutality is irreversible.