A crow sits on a sculpture of double-headed eagle, Russia's State Emblem in St.Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014. (Dmitry Lovetsky/AP)
The latest threat to the Kremlin has nothing to do with the constant struggles between hawks and doves in Putin's administration. Instead, it's coming from crows.
The Kremlin is being besieged by crows, who have been pecking away at the buildings, threatening their grand facades, disturbing tourists and once even reportedly stealing classified papers  to make nests.
The problem has long plagued Russian officials, who over the years have tried to get the crows to flee the fortress using everything from firing squads (that was the method of choice during Lenin’s time) to hawks that would hunt the crows as prey. None have rid the Kremlin of the cawing ornithological menace.
But Russian authorities have high hopes for their latest strategy: an eagle owl named Filya, who has been undergoing special training for the role of fearmonger-in-chief.
“Eagle owls are the natural enemies of crows,” Sergei Devyatov, head of the Federal Security Guard Service, said at a book signing event Tuesday, according to Russian news service Interfax. Filya’s been attacked by crowds of crows in the past, Devyatov explained, but “an eagle owl, with a wing span of two meters, can easily cut through a flock of crows.”
The video below shows what an eagle owl looks like coming in for a killer landing. (Pretty scary-looking stuff.)
Once Filya starts hanging around and dive-bombing into enough crows, Devyatov is sure they’ll get the message and scram.
But the best thing about Filya as a crow-fighting strategy? He won’t rust or break, and his work ethic would put even the most dedicated apparatchik to shame.
“Filya the Eagle Owl is an all-weather, round-the-clock bird, slowly flying above a flock of crows and catching everything he can reach,” Devyatov continued in a seeming paean to the eagle owl, according to the Interfax report. “With God’s blessing we will cope with the crow problem, using an ornithological method.”
So, eagle owl to the Kremlin’s rescue. Now if only Filya could figure out world peace.
Karoun Demirjian is a reporting fellow in The Post's Moscow bureau. She previously served as the Washington Correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun, and reported for the Associated Press in Jerusalem and the Chicago Tribune in Chicago.