As the Football world cup is nearing, hotel rooms still available to book in the cities hosting the event become harder to come by. In response, England's supporters start considering possible backup accommodation options in case local hotels are full up by the time the Cup starts.

As reported by the Daily Mail, Kevin Miles, the head of the Football Fans Federation of England, recently inquired from Visit Russia, the Russian national tourist agency, about possibilities for camping in Russia in the vicinity of some of the games host cities.

And, similar to the recent warning from the head of the Russian Football Union's security committee, the response appeared to be less than encouraging.

He was told that the camping infrastructure in the country is not fully developed, with an exception for tents pitched in the wild, where extreme caution is necessary because of danger presented by hungry bears roaming in the woods. The newspaper noted more and more of Russia's 70 thousand or so bears were in recent years coming to villages and cities due to a lack of food in their traditional habitat.

Bears reported entering cities and attacking people in Russia's far east

During the past years bears indeed were causing trouble in some of the Russian cities, although all sightings of them were from locations some thousands of miles away from the nearest World Cup game scheduled. Newsweek recently reported at least two people in Russia have been attacked and killed by aggressive, hungry bears that have been roaming populated areas in the country’s far east in search of food.

The magazine also quoted Sergei Prokhorenko, Russia's forestry ministry official, to confirm that authorities in the Sakhalin region shot a total of 83 bears within a week because of their of their hostility towards the local population.

A short video posted on Youtube in July 2016 showed a bear roaming next to a man sitting on a park bench in an unnamed Russian town. The Guardian reported two such animals in 2015 - a brown bear and a Himalayan bear having “taken over” Luchegorsk, a town near the Chinese border, as they were wandering the streets and scaring locals.

At the same time, Asian black bears were also spotted within the town, while a further three dozen bears were reported circling its surroundings. So yes, at least some of the Russian bears come ever closer to humans every year. The good news is that so far they were sighted nowhere close enough to disrupt the upcoming soccer event.