50 Roubles Southwest Asian Leopard

Issued as part of Russia's ongoing Red Book series, which has documented endangered species on bullion and collector coinage since the early 1990s, this piece marks a concerted effort by the Bank of Russia to spotlight the Amur leopard's cousin — the Caucasian subspecies whose wild population had collapsed to perhaps fewer than a dozen individuals in Russia by the time of minting. Conservation pressure from WWF Russia and the Russian Geographical Society was directly influencing state-level wildlife policy in this period, and the coin series ran parallel to captive breeding programs operating out of Sochi.