Public disputes concerning Russia, including its government, institutions, officials and citizens, and disputes over Russia's relations with other states.
Published coverage on this page: 1 case · 1 statement. Statements are ordered newest first.
Some reports say an Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute employee died of plague. Rospotrebnadzor says she had pneumonia of unknown etiology and found no emergency at the institute. The U.S. State Department says many details are unconfirmed. We found no announced test result identifying the cause.
Published
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1 matching statement
Role at the time: Head of the Republic of Buryatia, in a post on his VK page and MAX channel
Response to this claim
Alexei Tsydenov wrote on October 2, 2026, citing Rospotrebnadzor and the Buryatia government, that the woman he described as having died of plague in the Irkutsk region did not come to Buryatia and that Buryatia has no plague foci, including on the territory bordering Mongolia.
“женщина, погибшая от чумы в Иркутской области, не приезжала в Бурятию”
The reference point is the proposition that the illness of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute employee, reported to have died on October 1 or 2, 2026, was plague. Tsydenov states in passing that the woman died of plague, without a stated basis, so we used Condemned, which here records only an attributed assertion of the proposition. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, which fits the wording he posted on Telegram later that day (see the next entry) but not this text, which carries no qualifier. Challenged the characterization does not apply because he accepts the plague description rather than disputing it.
Igor Kobzev is a Russian state official who has been governor of Irkutsk Oblast, in Siberia, since December 2019, first as acting governor and, from September 2020, as an elected governor. A former military officer, he served as a deputy minister in Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations before taking the post.
1 case and 2 statements
Tal Brosh-Nissimov is an Israeli physician who specializes in infectious diseases. Israeli media identify him as director of the infectious diseases unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod University Hospital.
1 case and 1 statement
Alexei Tsydenov has been Head of the Republic of Buryatia, a Russian republic in Siberia on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, since 2017. He was elected in 2017 and re-elected in 2022. Before leading the republic he worked in railway transport and served as a deputy minister of transport of the Russian Federation.
1 case and 2 statements
Gennady Onishchenko is a Russian physician and epidemiologist. He served as Russia's Chief State Sanitary Doctor from 1996 to 2013 and headed Rospotrebnadzor from 2004 to 2013. A member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was a State Duma deputy from 2016 to 2021.
1 case and 1 statement
