March 11, 2026

Patriotic Post-Humanism


Patriotic Post-Humanism
Plants attack.  The Russian Life files

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast has created a register of "foreign agent plants”: a list of non-native species that threaten the environment or human health. The chairman of the regional Legislative Assembly, Evgeny Lyulin, reported on this in his Telegram channel. 

On March 1, 2026, a law came into force throughout Russia that obliges landowners to destroy dangerous plants on their property. In essence, nothing unique is happening in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast – officials are simply bringing local laws into line with federal ones – but it's all about creative wording. The new law attracted attention and was immediately picked up by several articles devoted to the seasonal fight against invasive species, with headlines like “Tatarstan declares war on plants: foreign agents,” tying the fight against invasive weeds to efforts to quell subversive movements.

The concept of a “foreign agent” first appeared in Russia in 2012 and has been constantly expanded and supplemented since then. Initially, this status could be assigned to organizations receiving funding from abroad. In 2017, the term “foreign agent media” was added to describe media outlets that, according to the Russian state, are under the influence of other countries and thus spread misinformation. Soon after, work began on a law that allowed individuals to be designated as foreign agents. The first list of foreign agent citizens was published in 2020, and it began to be regularly updated after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The label imposes a number of legal restrictions, but most importantly, it marks a person as hostile. The similarity between invasive plants and dissident internal elements writes itself.

According to the federal registry, there are between seven and ten different invasive species in each district, but Lyulin named as the main enemy the legendary Sosnovsky's hogweed, capable of causing severe burns (Russian Life reported on the hogweed problem way back in 2019 – see article links below). It was deliberately cultivated in the USSR as cheap silage, but has now become an agricultural problem. A popular conspiracy theory that hogweed was brought in by Western secret services is respected even in the State Duma.

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