Lake Burlinskoye, a salty lake located in Russia’s Altai region close to the border with Kazakhstan, is famous both for its pink color during the summer and the freight train passing through it every day.

Seeing an old freight train seemingly floating over a pink lake in Western Siberia is quite a bizarre experience, but somehow it all makes sense. Lake Burlinskoye is the largest single salt deposit in Siberia, with a saltiness that rivals that of the Dead Sea. It is precisely this exceptionally high saltiness that attracts a species of microscopic brine shrimp called Artemia salina which, as they multiply, end up turning the lake bright pink during the summer months. Siberia’s pink lake is a strange enough sight, but what really sets Burlinskoye apart from other bodies of water is the freight train traversing it several times per day.

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Kroshik, a 14-year-old ginger cat from the Russian city of Perm lost his ability to walk after ballooning to a whopping 17 kilograms (38 pounds) in weight due to overfeeding by his loving humans.

Photos of the obese Kroshik went viral last week after being shared on Russian social network VKontakte by volunteers at the Matroskin Animal Shelter in Perm. In them, a young woman is struggling to hold him in her arms, which makes sense, considering he weighs three times as much as he should. According to Matroskin staff, Kroshik was rescued from a local hospital whose staff contacted them after the 14-year-old feline lost his ability to walk due to his weight and advanced age. Kroshik had been living in the hospital basement for years, hunting rodents and enjoying the affection of humans, but in the last few years, he ballooned in seize due to overfeeding. When he got so fat that he literally couldn’t stand on his four legs, nurses at the hospital called the animal shelter.

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The town of Kudrovo, in Russia’s Leningrad Region, is home to the country’s largest residential building, a giant oval-shaped monstrosity featuring 3708 apartments and 35 different entrances.

Completed in 2015 as part of the massive ‘Novyy Okkervil’ residential complex on the outskirts of Kudrovo, Russia’s largest residential building got its first international coverage in 2021 when aerial photos of it made it to the first page of Reddit, getting over 50,000 upvotes and thousands of comments. People were equally fascinated and freaked out by the enormous building, and many compared it to a human anthill. The comparison is not as farfetched as it might seem, because the concrete oval of Kudrovo is home to between 11,000 and 18,000 people (reports from Russian media vary) all technically living under the same roof.

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A Russian man who got a vasectomy after fathering four children is preparing to sue the medical clinic that botched the surgery and caused him to father a fifth child.

In 2022, after becoming a father for the fourth time, Maxim, a 45-year-old man from the Russian city of Ufa, made the radical decision to get a vasectomy to ensure that he didn’t get his wife pregnant again. He visited “Promeditsina”, a local medical clinic that performed vasectomies, and agreed to pay 30,000 rubles ($330) for the operation. The procedure was successful and Maxim was discharged from the clinic after only a few hours. Everything was well and good until early last year when Maxim’s wife told him that she was pregnant again, which was quite a shock, considering the circumstances. Despite the man’s hopes of a false positive result on the pregnancy test, In November of last year, he became a father for the fifth time.

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A Russian chess player is facing a lifetime ban from official competitions after allegedly trying to poison an opponent by spreading mercury compounds on her chess board.

Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, stands accused of trying to poison another female player during a chess tournament in Makhachkala. Surveillance footage from the Dagestan Classical Chess Championship shows the 40-year-old woman spreading a substance later identified as mercury on the chess board and pieces that would later be used by another player, Umayganat Osmanova. CCTV footage clearly shows Abakarova walking to the table where Osmanova was about to play and tampering with the chess board and pieces before casually walking away so as not to draw attention. Her actions would have probably gone unnoticed had Umayganat Osmanova not begun to experience symptoms like nausea and dizziness just 30 minutes later.

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A Russian man who had experienced pain and discomfort under his ribs for the last nine years was shocked to discover that he had a 9 cm glass shard embedded in his liver.

The 53-year-old unnamed man told doctors at the Kirov Regional Clinical Hospital, in Russia, that he had long experienced sharp pain and discomfort on the right side of his body, under his ribs, but he never bothered getting it checked out. After finally deciding to seek medical help for his problem, he underwent a CT scan which revealed a sharp object stuck in the right lobe of his liver. When doctors asked what the object might be, the patient told them that he had no idea, as he had no history of trauma, nor could he remember an incident where a sharp object could have entered his body. After operating on the man laparoscopically, surgeons removed a 9-cm-long glass shard from his liver.

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A 24-year-old Russian woman recently got the shock of her life when learning that she had been married to an Egyptian citizen since 2022, about a year after losing her passport.

The unnamed St. Petersburg resident lost her passport in the summer of 2021, but despite declaring the loss to the local police, she never bothered getting her travel document reissued. She didn’t really need a new passport after that and she never imagined that the old one could be used by anyone else, but earlier this year, while trying to have a birth certificate issued for her baby, the young woman learned that her husband, an Egyptian man named Mustafa, needed to be present as well. She had never met Mustafa, let alone married him, but the Russian registry listed him as her spouse.

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A  football field at the Luzhniki Olympic Sports Complex on the outskirts of Moscow recently hosted the world’s longest football game, which lasted a total of 26 hours.

To celebrate All-Russian Football Day last Saturday, two teams of 7 players each gathered at the Luzhniki Olympic Sports Complex to break the record for the longest football match ever. The game started at noon on Saturday and ended after 26 hours, at 2 in the afternoon on Sunday. The previous record had been set in 2014 when two teams played the beautiful game for 24 hours straight. This time around, the Red Team defeated the White Team with a score of 416 goals to 409.

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After the owner of a Russian supermarket chain announced that he would be paying 1 million rubles to each person proven to have gotten food poisoning from the store’s products, many decided to take him up on his offer.

Earlier this month, Yekaterinburg-based supermarket chain Zhiznmart came under fire for allegedly selling compromised food products that had landed at least 18 people in the hospital with food poisoning. As a result, several suppliers refused to work with Zhiznmart anymore for fear of getting audited by Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s federal agency in charge of consumer wellbeing and protection. Left with empty shells and a sullied reputation, Zhiznmart founder made a bold public statement, promising to compensate each person proven to have been poisoned by his products with 1 million rubles ($11,000). His promise went viral, and before long, people were trying to get food poisoning at Zhiznmart and get compensated.

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A Moscow woman recently got the shock of her life when she entered her bathroom and saw a full-grown white Boa constrictor snake hanging out on her toilet bowl.

Exotic snakes crawling up from toilets may not be a worthy news topic in countries like Australia or Brazil, where the slithering reptiles are virtually a part of everyday life, but as a European living in a bustling city, it’s not the kind of thing you ever expect to see. However, one Moscow resident almost had a heart attack when she entered her bathroom and found an albino boa constrictor coming out of her toilet bowl. The shocked woman slammed the bathroom door shut and immediately called emergency service. It turned out that the snake was a fellow resident of the apartment building who had simply gone out to explore its drain pipe system.

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A young Moscow resident was recently fined and prosecuted by police for dyeing his hair yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

On the night of April 27, Stanislav Netesov was attacked by unknown assailants at a bus stop in the center of Moscow as he was returning from work. He had his phone stolen and a tooth knocked out, but when he went to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Tverskoy district the next day to report the crime he was shocked to learn that, instead of providing him assistance, the authorities were more interested in the color of his hair. Netesov had his hair dyed yellow, blue, and green which the police considered a symbol of Ukraine and an offense to the Russian army, which is punishable by law.

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A young tattoo artist from St. Petersburg, Russia, was recently detained for insulting religious believers with controversial tattoos featuring Jesus Christ, the cross and other Christian symbols.

Daria Krichker is facing up to one year in jail for her crimes. According to the Orthodox activist group that filed a complaint against her, she has committed “repeated gross blasphemous acts against Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints of the Church,” which “cannot be tolerated on Russian soil. It all started earlier this month when photos of a tattoo reportedly inked on Krichker’s own calf went viral on social media. It showed Jesus on the cross having an orgasm, which isn’t the kind of creative work that religious people would appreciate. It’s weird, many would describe it as disgusting, but in Russia, such a tattoo can literally land you behind bars.

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A rather bizarre act of vandalism was recently reported at an art exhibition in Moscow, where a security guard damaged an art exhibit and tried to eat it.

Last week, the organizers of a contemporary art exhibition at Moscow’s VDNKh permanent exhibition center noticed that one of the exhibits was missing its main protagonist. Named “Escape of the Goldfish”, the art piece featured a goldfish bowl with a goldfish sticking out of it right next to a painting of the open sea, with another goldfish stuck to it as if it had jumped from the bowl and into the waves. A thought-provoking concept, and one that caught the eye of the security guard on duty, only instead of admiring it from a distance and doing his job, the guy vandalized the very thing he was paid to protect.

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A 23-year-old Russian man recently revealed that he trained and used ChatGPT to filter through 5,239 girls’ dating profiles and then date the best matches until he found his soon-to-be wife.

Alexander Zhadan first made waves on RuNet – the online Russian-speaking community – a year ago, when he tweeted that he wrote an academic thesis using ChatGPT in just 23 hours. A few days ago, the young Russian IT professional once again made news headlines, this time for using the same AI tool to filter through thousands of online dating profiles and relying on its tips and advice to find the perfect partner and then make her his wife. Zhadan’s story, originally told through a series of posts on X/Twitter, has sparked a heated debate on the morality of using AI tools to find love online, and while the 23-year-old admits that his story could change how others see online dating, he did point out that ChatGPT has its limitations and that he needed to get involved personally to connect with his dates.

It all started with Alexander’s disappointing experience with popular dating apps like Tinder. He would swipe left, then right, then spark a conversation with a potential match and then that person would just disappear. It was a huge waste of time, but having become familiar with ChatGPT, he wondered if there was a way to use the AI tool to make his online dating experience more efficient.

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Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science recently fired the director of the prestigious Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences allegedly for controversial remarks that are incompatible with science.

Geneticist Alexander Kudryavtsev was named director of the General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in June of 2021 and was scheduled to carry out his mandate until 2027, but last month, Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science announced that Kudryavtsev had been relieved of his duties and replaced. His sacking was immediately linked to a series of controversial statements made in March of last year, during the 3rd International Scientific and Theological Conference “God – Man – World”. The Russian scientist claimed that before the biblical flood, humans used to live for up to 900 years, but that their lifespan has shortened since then due to “original, ancestral and personal sin.”

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