1% of Russia would be 1.5 million (and given this thread, 412k for Ukraine).
According to the 2014 survey https://fom.ru/Obraz-zhizni/11711 , 75% Russians have ever went to pick up mushrooms, and 40% have done it in the last year before the survey. 8% personally know people who suffered from mushroom poisoning.
This corresponds to my expectations: I'm from a neighbouring country, Belarus, and basically almost everyone around me has been picking up mushrooms.
That's not just a culinary experience, but a way to relax: go to forest, disconnect from the world, unwind. (People also pick up blueberries and lingonberries for the same reasons.)
Oh, and my classmate died from mushroom poisoning.
Intoxication leading to hospitalization is a better measure.
eating a poisonous mushroom seems way easier. Less steps, less oversight, a calmer activity that doesn't provoke a crowd response.
but , in theory, that would also be exactly the alibi you'd want for a believable story: "gun nut shoots himself to death by accident" when you're being a sneaky vindictive government who wants to rid itself of someone.
It's kind of as easy as 'boating accident'; and whenever poison/russia is combined in a sentence it's pretty easy to make accusations given the storied history of political poisonings in that region.
It must taste incredible.
Foraging for mushrooms does not require huge amounts expertise. It requires a little bit of common sense.
If you regularly went foraging, it would have been possible for you to learn a few easily identifiable and unmistakable mushrooms. At least in the Nordics (and I assume it would be the same near by), it is quite easy to teach another person a few mushrooms to forage for when you can show the mushrooms growing in the wild and explain the few identifying traits.
Google is letting me down but I believe something like this happened to a Vietnamese family in the UK.
The general rule here is that you only ever pick mushroom species somebody has thoroughly introduced you to - books and "I think we ate those at our friends house the other day" are considered quite reckless.
There are some edible mushrooms with poisonous look alikes - there are plenty other edible mushrooms without those deadly cousins. If this gentleman had made it 70+ years without issue, it is rather unlikely he would have some issue now.
As the saying goes: there are old foragers and bold foragers, but there are not old and bold foragers.
> In that part of the world, this is very common, and so are the cases of people poisoning themselves because they think they are good at it.
It's very common for people to die of mushroom poisoning in Russia?
Both: https://charter97.org/ru/news/2023/8/31/561949/
They say that on 9th of August he went foraging, on 10th of August he ate the mushrooms and went from his dacha to Moscow, he felt bad on that day. In the morning of 11th of August he had ambulance called for him. He was in hospital until 30th of August when he died.
> It's very common for people to die of mushroom poisoning in Russia?
According to official stats https://www.rospotrebnadzor.ru/activities/recommendations/de... around 30 people die of mushroom poisoning in Russia every year. (And around 1000 suffer from such poisoning every year.)
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/05/17/1175494...
It's gravity!
It happens, particularly "glock leg". But to be frank a lot of those "sat down in their office/study, looked down the barrel of the gun and accidentally pulled the trigger" deaths are suicides staged as accidents for the benefit of their family. Put a cleaning kit on the desk and there won't be many questions.
I knew many people who regularly collected mushrooms, and did it myself, never heard any cases of fatal poisoning. It's not that it doesn't happen at all, but - especially among people who do it regularly - it's pretty rare and usually happens when people try something "exotic" or buy from untrusted third party.
In this particular case, of course, it's pretty clear shat happened - same thing tgat happened to all thise people falling out of the windows and the same thing that happened to Utkin and Prigozhin. Putin happened.
It's not suspicious at all! People go swimming and get into trouble with rip tides all the time! Nothink to see here.
In that part of the world, this is very common, and so are the cases of people poisoning themselves because they think they are good at it.
If you can't relate - think of all the "gun people" who think they are experts on gun safety and then they end up shooting themselves by accident.