In order to get the attention of the government in Moscow, the citizens of a small Russian village have launched an initiative to their name from Bungur to “Syria”. Their reasoning is that Russia has invested tens of millions of dollars in the middle eastern state, so surely they can spare some rubles for a Syria a little closer to home.

Bungur has been in a state of disrepair for a long time, and things are only getting worse. The roads are damaged, the electricity and water supply switch off intermittently, and healthcare services are nonexistent. While these kinds of complaints are not unusual for small Russian communities, this village’s way of trying to deal with the situation has raised some eyebrows.

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Big sporting events like the World Cup are supposed to bring people together in support of their favorite teams and players, but for one Russian couple married for 14 years, the 2018 World Cup was reason for divorce.

40-year-old Arsen and his 37-year-old wife, Ludmyla, are both big football fans. In fact, they met in a Chelyabinsk sports bar during the 2002 World Cup, and they bonded over their mutual passion for the sport. The fact that they were fans of two rival Moscow football clubs, Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moskow, didn’t stop them from getting married, but last week, it was their love for the two biggest rivals in modern football history – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – that ended their 14-year marriage.

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The head of a Russian advertising agency tasked with creating large building facades to promote the 2018 World Cup in Russia has come under fire for using one of the nearly 50-meter-tall facades to pay tribute to his wife, by using her as the model.

Ivan Panteleev, director of advertising agency Novatek Art has been criticised by street artists and members of the general public for putting a giant portrait of his wife Daria on a building facade funded by the Moscow city budget. Four murals were commissioned and co-sponsored by the city’s public relations committee in 2016, to remind the people of Moscow of the upcoming (now ongoing) World Cup, and some people didn’t like that Panteleev used his wife, of all people, as the model for one of the giant artworks.

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Doctors in Russia recently reported the unusual case of a woman who noticed that a number blemishes appeared to move around her face every few days. Those blemishes turned out to be a live parasitic worm crawling under her skin.

The unnamed woman first noticed a small bump under her left eye, but didn’t pay too much attention to it until, five days later, when it disappeared only to be replaced by three larger blemishes above the eye. Then, 10 days later, those disappeared as well, but her upper lip became swollen. Disturbed by these symptoms, the Moscow-based woman sought medical help and ultimately learned that those strange bumps were actually a live parasitic worm called Dirofilaria repens slithering under her skin.

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Anzhelika Protodyakonova, a young fashion blogger from Russia, shot to social media flame after photos of her huge eyebrows, which cover most of her forehead, went viral on the internet.

They say every cloud has a silver lining, and the story of how Anzhelika Protodyakonova became a popular online fashion blogger and a social media star in her native country is a perfect example of that. Seven years ago, while riding on a bus in Yakutsk, Russia’s Sakha Republic, Anzhelika drew the attention of another passenger who just couldn’t take her eyes off her unusually large eyebrows. The woman took a photo of her and posted it online, where it quickly went viral. Anzhelika soon became known as “Bushy Angie”, and while she admits being embarrassed by the photo at first, the young girl quickly embraced her new-found popularity and even managed to make a living off of it.

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Russian media recently featured the story of Taras Shelest, a highly-regarded passenger jet pilot who turned out to be a complete fraud. Despite having never attended aviation university and instead faking his diploma, Shelest allegedly flew thousands of people all around the world for several years, until a bizarre incident finally exposed him.

In August of 2015, Taras Shelest was a co-pilot on a passenger flight from Moscow to Cyprus. When entering Ukrainian airspace, he contacted the ground controller as per protocol, only instead of sticking to the strict technical language, he used a very peculiar greeting – “Glory to Ukraine!” This was apparently so unusual that Shelest was reported to his company’s security service, which in turn contacted the FSB, Russia’s federal security service. Taras’ fellow pilots were whispering to each other that he had lost his mind, for using that bizarre greeting, but the result of the investigation into his background revealed something even crazier – the man was not even a real pilot, but a flight enthusiast who had taught himself to fly using flying simulators and faked his aviation university diploma.

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Ordering a bag of herbal tea on the internet sounds harmless enough, but, as one young Russian man learned a couple of years ago, it can sometimes land you in prison for a very long time.

Alexei Novikov’s incredibly sad story began in September of 2015. The 34-year-old man was going to pick up his wife and daughter, who were living in Russia’s Samara region at the time, and decided to hitchhike instead of taking the bus. To cut his trip short, Novikov decided to cut through neighboring Kazakhstan, and in order to avoid any unnecessary trouble, he headed to the Isikul Road border post. Once there, he asked the border guards if he could cross the border on foot, but before answering him, they demanded that he present his backpack for inspection. And that’s when everything started going downhill for Novikov.

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The Russian city of Sochi is known as a popular seaside destination and for having hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. But what most people don’t know about the seaside city is that it is home to a special type of residential complexes – so-called “Russian Favelas” made up of Soviet-era car garages converted into 3, 4 even 5-storey homes.

Having a garage built into a house or apartment building isn’t unusual at all, but while in the US they are considered annexes to the main building, in the Russian city of Sochi, it’s the other way around. The garage is the main building upon which owners have built several storey residential annexes which they then rent out to migrants or families too poor to afford conventional homes. In order to avoid having to register these bizarre residential buildings as actual houses and paying higher taxes, owners maintain the ground floor as garages, preferring instead to build as many storeys on top of them as legally possible to maximize their profits.

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54-year-old Konstantin Scherbinin, a Russian multi-millionaire who made his fortune in the oil business, is letting his children pick out his next wife on a controversial reality show called ‘Millionaire for Marriage’.

Scherbinin has allegedly vowed to respect the on-screen decision of his three daughters and one son, and propose to the lucky woman they select out of the 2,000 hopeful candidates. To show his commitment to the reality show, the oil mogul has designated his oldest son to run his businesses while he and the rest of the family focus on finding a new bride. The producers of Millionaire for Marriage have been criticized by Russian viewers for turning a show that is supposed to be about love into a battle for a sugar daddy who can provide a comfortable life fot the winner.

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After having its written payment notifications ignored by a client, a utility company in Russia came up with an ingenious way of coercing the debtor to pay his dues – it dumped a three-tonne concrete pyramid in front of his luxurious villa.

Samara Utility Systems Ltd. had long been trying to get the unnamed resident of Zubchaninovka village, in Russia’s Samara region, to pay his 50,000 ruble ($810) debt for unpaid water bills. The company had sent him several written notifications, had contacted him by phone, and even sent people to reason with him in person, but to no avail. So management decided to try something new. They commissioned a 3-tonne-heavy, 1.5-meter-tall concrete pyramid, plastered it with shameful slogans and dumped it in front of his home, to serve as a reminder that he had a debt to bay.

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In what can only be described as one of the dumbest ideas by a criminal ever, a young Russian thief covered his face with green paint to make himself harder to recognize by potential witnesses. Spoilers – it didn’t work.

Last weekend, police in the Russian city of Krasnodar arrested a 23-year-old man accused of stealing a woman’s purse at a local train station. According to a statement by the Krasnodar office of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the victim notified police that her purse had been snatched while she was waiting at the train station, and a team was dispatched to investigate. Upon arriving at the scene, police officers started questioning eyewitnesses about the perpetrator and learned that he had a very distinctive, albeit unusual trait – his face was completely green.

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While countries like Germany or on track to completely phase out nuclear power plants by 2022, Russia’s is building more of them and even making them floatable so they can provide power to remote areas. However, not everyone is convinced that placing a powerful nuclear reactor on a ship is such a good idea.

Looking exactly like what you would imagine a floating power plant to look like, the Akademik Lomonosov is certainly an impressive sight to behold. Its mission, to provide power to in remote regions of Russia’s extreme north and far east, is also quite interesting, as it allows Russia to significantly cut costs by just moving the ship to where it is needed, instead of moving machinery out by land. If everything goes according to plan, the Lomonosov should prove a great asset to Russia, but environmentalists and nuclear experts are worried that in case of a natural disaster, it could cause an environmental catastrophe.

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Elizaveta Tkachenko, a 30-year-old woman from Russia, wound up in the emergency room earlier this month, after getting unknown substances injected into her face by an unlicensed aesthetician.

Tkachenko, a resident of Stavropol, had decided that she wanted to enhance certain facial features with the help of cosmetic filler injections, only instead of going to a trained aesthetician, she turned to her friend Irina, an accountant, who did the procedures at home, for cheaper. Tvacheno, who would live to regret her decision, claims that her friend assured her that she only used quality fillers and sterile instruments, and that she had plenty of experience in this field.

The woman had an unknown quantity of filler injected into her lips and near her eyes, and although some swelling is considered normal after such procedures, in Elizaveta’s case it was so extreme that she had trouble breathing, her head would ache terribly and her lips looked ready to burst. A day after the botched injections, she had to be taken to the hospital.

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Russian senator Valentina Petrenko’s political career stretches back to the days of the former Soviet Union, and she’s since held various senior official jobs, but the thing she is most known for is her hair. Already the subject of countless memes on Russian social media, Petrenko’s glorious hairdo recently went viral internationally, and people just can’t stop talking about it.

Speculation regarding Valentina Petrenko’s bizarre hairstyle has been running rampant on Twitter ever since Alex Bruce-Smith, an associate news editor at Pedestrian Daily, shared some photos of the Russian senator representing the Republic of Khakassia. There’s just so much people want to know about her hair. Is it real or a wig? How does she make it stay up like that? Is that where all the Russian top-secret information is hidden? Unfortunately, all anyone can do at this point is speculate, as the Russian politician doesn’t seem very eager to talk about it.

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A motorist from the Russian city of Novosibirsk teamed up with a local ice sculptor to create a unique Mercedes G-Class SUV using blocks of ice mounted on a metal chassis and powered by an old engine.

Vladislav Barashenkov, the host of Garage 54, a popular YouTube channel focusing on cars, recently went viral for an invention that’s as outrageous as it is cool – a budget version of the Mercedes G-Class luxury SUV made largely out of clear blocks of ice. But Barashenkov wanted it to be more than just a cool looking ice sculpture, so he simply had the sculptor create the body out of ice, which he then mounted on the chassis of an old UAZ 469 military utility vehicle. That made the ice SUV drivable, although riding in it isn’t as smooth as a real G-Class.

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