As the world becomes a more contentious place, a group of 1,000 French goats find themselves unlikely pawns in a trade spat inspired by trade sanctions on Russia.
Russia banned the wholesale import of fresh food from the European Union, including dairy products, in response to sanctions imposed on Moscow after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. As a result, the French goats have found a new home in Russia's Ural mountains as a local company bets on producing European-style cheeses no longer available for import.
The owners of mining company UMMC have added goats to their copper and coal assets, and Iskandar Makhmudov and Andrey Kozytsin, both on the Forbes list of Russia's 100 richest people, are among UMMC's main shareholders. The company, UGMK-Agro, spent one million euros on trucking the Alpine goats 5,000 km from the Vendee region in France. Working out of a converted cowshed north of Yekaterinburg, it is aiming to be Russia's largest producer of white mould goat's cheese, a French delicacy.
The company has invested $3.4 million in cheese production and expects to turn a profit in six years.
UGMK-Agro plans to produce 500-700 kg of cheese a day by the spring of 2018.
(Reuters reporting by Diana Asonova and Natalia Shurmina; writing by Polina Ivanova; editing by Katya Golubkova and David Evans)