MORE than 3,500 bear cubs are being orphaned every year in Russia by politicians and wealthy businessmen who take part in trophy hunts. Most of the cubs, which are too small to fend for themselves in the wild, are left to die.

Wealthy hunters pay thousands of pounds to hunt brown and black bears in Siberia and the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian far east. Most have a licence, but killing a female bear with cubs under a year old is technically illegal. Many hunters simply ignore the rule.

Cubs often lose their mothers to unscrupulous hunters during winter hibernation. To the fury of environmentalists, killing a bear in its den is not outlawed. A common practice is to wake the adult bears and scare them out of their dens.

Bleary-eyed, they are gunned down as soon as they emerge. The hunters do not even check whether they have cubs.

“Hunting bears while they’re hibernating is cold-blooded murder,” said Masha Vorontsova of the International Fund for Animals Welfare, which is trying to have the practice outlawed.

In most cases, cubs are left to die of starvation. Some are given to villagers as pets. Others go to street photographers, itinerant zoos and circuses. A few are rescued by conservationists who release them when they are old enough to feed themselves.

Occasionally poachers are prosecuted. But wealthy or well connected hunters need only claim they did not know a bear had cubs to escape punishment. The symbol of Russian might, the bear has long been a coveted trophy. Bear shooting was a popular sport for Communist party bosses in the Soviet era and brown bears would be sedated to help ageing Kremlin leaders hit their targets.

Five years ago Russia’s powerful hunting lobby, which includes Kremlin insiders, succeeded in having a hunting ban on the Asian black bear lifted. The move alarmed conservationists, who are warning that the species risks extinction.

Far from protecting the bears, the government last year passed a law that allows hunters who discover they have shot a mother to kill her cubs as well. “Hunting is very fashionable among the elite, be they politicians or businessmen,” said a Kremlin insider.

“The rarer the animal, the greater the trophy.”

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