Russia decries social media animal movement craze

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday decried a new fitness trend of imitating animal movements, as Moscow's lawmakers denounced the "immoral" social media craze and mulled banning it.

Russia has taken an ultra-conservative turn since sending troops to Ukraine in early 2022, and is suspicious of anything deemed as Western.

Such is Moscow's disdain, that "quadrobics" even came up during a meeting of former Soviet republics.

Quadrobics has been described as mimicking animal movements, often on all fours, as a form of exercise and has also turned into a social media trend, in which young people wearing animal masks dance to music.

"Quadrobics. Children dress up as dogs. One of the main (bits of) news," Lavrov told his Armenian counterpart Ararat Mirzoyan -- who looked puzzled -- in a gilded Kremlin hall during the CIS meeting.

"They dress up as dogs and they walk like animals," he added, laughing, in a video published by the TASS state news agency.

His comments came as Russian lawmakers announced last week they were looking at banning the trend after a pro-Kremlin singer had called it out during a concert, even mocking a little girl for dressing up as a cat.

A lawmaker from a parliamentary education committee, Yana Lantratova, last week said that MPs were drafting a bill to ban "destructive ideology", including quadrobics.

"It is not as harmless as it seems at first glance," Lantratova told state news agency RIA Novosti.

The movement was catapulted into the public debate last month when vocal pro-Kremlin singer Mia Boyka (whose real name is Maria Boyko) humiliated a child on stage.

"Are you a cat or, God forbid, a quadrobic?", the singer asked a visibly nervous girl.

After the child replied "a quadrobic", the 27 year-old singer addressed the crowd, saying: "Does anyone support this?", with the audience jeering the little girl.

Boyko later defended humiliating the child, saying the "trend is absolutely alien to our society and came from the West".

"Today a kitty, tomorrow a doggie and the day after tomorrow she will decide that she is now a boy."

Russia has long railed against LGBTQ people, describing them as a Western-influenced "movement".

The Russian Orthodox Church -- whose influence has massively risen in recent years -- denounced the trend shortly after Boyko's remarks.

Its representative on societal issues, Vakhtang Kipshidze, said that quadrobics was "the propaganda of returning to barbarism, to the depths of paganism".