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.
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.