Pair of Persian leopards land in Russia from Sweden

Two Persian leopards landed in Moscow on Sunday to join a program for the reintroduction of leopards into the wild. The leopards, an eight-year-old female and a nine-year-old male, traveled from a Stockholm zoo by plane to Moscow via Dubai. They are being taken to the Center for Reintroduction of the Leopard in the Caucasus in the Sochi National Park, near the southern Russian city of Sochi.

"This is a very important event for our program," said the program's director Nikolai Voronin, adding that he hoped the pair would produce cubs that would later be released in the wild.

The rehabilitation center has already released seven leopards into the wild in the Caucasus Nature Reserve, a region that the animals inhabited before their population dwindled. "In a sense this is new blood and a new genetic line," said Dmitry Gorshkov, the director of WWF Russia, which helped facilitate the transfer of the leopards on Sunday.