RUSSIANS bored by today’s predictable presidential election have turned their attention to a puzzle that emerged from the corridors of power last week: what on earth did the Kremlin want with 3,200 white mice worth more than £10,000?

The Federal Guard Service, the Russian equivalent of the American Secret Service and guardian of both Vladimir Putin’s security and the Kremlin grounds, advertised for the rodents, specifying that they should be female, white, laboratory-bred and weighing no more than 18 grams (just over half an ounce). Delivery to be arranged by the end of the year.

That was it. Stonewalling officials were as inscrutable as they would have been if questioned about any state secret.

They refused point blank to explain what the Kremlin was going to do with its purchase. The mice, it seems, are classified.

It is no surprise that their masters’ silence has thrown Russians – who are prone to believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories at the best of times – into a frenzy of internet and press speculation.

Bloggers suggested that the mice were needed for experiments with polonium210, the radioactive poison used to kill Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent, in London.

To add spice to the theory, they pointed out that Andrei Lugovoi, the man wanted by Scotland Yard on suspicion of murdering Litvinenko, served in the guard until the mid1990s.

A newspaper wondered whether they were needed as official food tasters for Putin, the outgoing president, and his all-but-certain successor, Dmitry Medvedev. The Kremlin kitchens can be poisonous places, they pointed out.

“One would have thought that we’d have more important matters to worry about than the fate of a few thousand mice,” said Oleg Churkin, a Russian television executive.

“But I also imagined that we’d have greater state secrets than this. I guess it’s silly season.”

That failed to stem the conspiracists. Historians pointed out that there is a long tradition of bizarre animal experiments in Russia, dating back to Stalin’s era.

A more likely (and banal) explanation for the Kremlin’s appetite for white mice began to emerge yesterday.

Kremlin hawks - not the militarist type - are kept in an aviary and regularly released to pounce on unsuspecting crows that damage the golden onion domes of the fortress’s cathedrals.

It seems the fate of the mice is to become gourmet bird food.

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