Here is something you don’t see every day – a woman casually waiting for the subway train in Moscow with a full-grown pet fox perched on her shoulder. A video of the unnamed blonde woman and her unusual pet has been doing the rounds on Russian social media for a week. Its origin is currently unknown, but it went viral after it was uploaded on Instagram by Russian fitness trainer @valerasupertrener. Footage shows a young blonde woman holding the leash of an adult fox perched precariously on her shoulder, as they both wait for the train in a Moscow subway station. The animal doesn’t seem particularly concerned about either the other subway riders staring at it, or the train as it storms into the station, which suggests that this is not its first train ride. As the doors open, the woman steps inside while trying to keep her back straight as not to affect the fox’s balance. Read More »

A 22-year-old female fan of the hit TV show “The Vampire Diaries” who considered herself the real-life vampire heroine Elena Gilbert was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison after stabbing a man that she allegedly considered a werewolf. The bizarre attack occurred in the Russian city of Novosibirsk, back in February. Ekaterina Tirskaya, a fan of supernatural-themed video games and TV shows, met her unnamed victim on social media, and, after hitting it off online, the two decided to meet up in person as well. They went for a date and when it came time to call it a night, the man reportedly asked Ekaterina if she wanted to come to his place for a nightcap. She accepted, and as it often happens in such cases, the two ended up spending the night together. But things got weird the following morning, as the man later told police that the woman he woke up next to was very different than the one he had bedded. And by different, he meant violent vampire out for blood. Read More »

A Russian man has become so attached to a wolf that he adopted as a small pup that when he had to leave his old home and move into an apartment in the big city of Volgograd, he took the wolf with him. Ivan L. and his daughter have been sharing their home with Gray, a full grown wild wolf, for several years now. It was easier when they lived in Astrakhan, but things got considerably more complicated when they had to move into a one-room apartment on the first floor of a nine-story building in Volgograd. Still, despite facing many challenges, they managed to make it work, and Ivan says he couldn’t imagine his life without his beloved pet. Read More »

A Russian man who reportedly has the habit of scamming tattoo artists by refusing to pay for their work recently got “scammer” permanently tattooed on his forehead by his latest victim. A photo of the smiling unnamed man showing off his unusual forehead tattoo was posted online last week by Russian tattoo artist Roman Bikeev, a.k.a. Mr Amsterdam. In the photo caption, Bikeev explained that the man had come in for a neck tattoo, but later said that he had no intention of paying for the artwork and nonchalantly admitted to pulling the same trick on other tattoo artist in Ufa, the capital city of the Republic of Baskortostan. So the tattoo artist decided to take his revenge by inking “Кидала” (Russian for ‘scammer) on the man’s forehead, along with his autograph. Read More »

A Russian man miraculously survived after inserting an 8-inch kitchen knife into his skull. Asked why he did that to himself, the man told police that he was trying to make another hole so he could breathe better. Last week, police in the town of Donetsk, Russia’s Rostov region, found a local man kneeling by himself in a field with a knife handle sticking out of the top of his head. The 8-inch blade was almost completely buried into his skull, but the man was fully conscious and did not appear to have sustained any serious brain damage. When a shocked policeman asked him who had stuck the knife into his head, the man calmly said that he was having trouble breathing through his nose, so he used the knife to make another hole to breathe through. But the knife got stuck and he couldn’t get it out… Read More »

A family in Russia’s Barnaul region was recently taken to court by the local energy company for accumulating a debt of approximately 80,000 rubles ($1,218) in unpaid bills. In their defense, the accused claimed that it was all their cat’s fault, not theirs. It’s one thing for kids to say “the dog ate my homework”, but you don’t often hear adults trying to lay the blame on their pets in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. That’s exactly what this family in Barnaul did, though, and not just anywhere, but in front of a judge. Accused of refusing to pay the local energy company around 80,000 in electrical bills, they claimed that they hadn’t actually used the electricity, but that meter had been tampered with by their mischievous cat. Read More »

A young couple has been making news headlines in Russia for claiming that live chicks hatched out of a carton of store-bought eggs they forgot on a window sill before going on vacation three weeks ago. Irina and Ivan, two entertainers from Moscow, Russia, recently posted photos of cute yellow chicks on their social media accounts, which they allege hatched out of eggs that they forgot to put back in the fridge before going on vacation, three weeks ago. When they returned, they started hearing faint squeaks from the kitchen, which they initially attributed to faulty gadgets, but later traced back to a carton of eggs that had been sitting on a window sill for weeks. Shortly after, they claim chicks started chipping away at the egg shell from the inside. Read More »

A Russian pensioner recently made national news headlines after stripping two tall pine trees on his neighbors’ property of all their branches and using them as supports for a wooden tree house. He never asked for permission to do this, instead taking advantage of the fact that they were away on vacation. Irina Chukanova and her family have been living on a small plot of land near the city of Nizhny Tagil for 10 years, and they’ve never had any problems with their neighbor, Yuri Stepanov. That all changed this spring, when the pensioner started complaining about the two pine trees growing on the Chukanovs’ property, claiming that all the needles and cones ended up on his land, and he was sick of having to clean up the mess. He repeatedly asked his neighbors to cut down the trees, but they were reluctant to do so, and instead promised to come up with a solution in the fall. Only Stepanov apparently got sick of waiting, and decided to take matters into his own hands. Read More »

Armyansk, a city on the Russian-occupied Crimea Peninsula, has been left without any kind of birds after a mysterious chemical incident at the nearby Crimean Titan plant. On August 23 – 24, an unknown substance spewed into the atmosphere, covering everything in a rust-like plaque and emanating a foul odor. Social media was buzzing with reports and photos of houses, cars and even plants covered in the mysterious substance, but occupation authorities ignored them for several days. At first, people started noticing that, apart from the occasional crow, there were no more birds in Armyansk, but then things got progressively worse. More and more residents of the Crimean city began experiencing breathing problems, but local authorities and the media completely ignored them. Read More »

The Russian branch of Domino’s Pizza was curious to know just how much people love their pies, so they came up with a promotion that challenged fans to get a tattoo of the Domino’s logo in a visible spot on their bodies, for the chance to win 100 free pizzas per year, for 100 years. The response was overwhelming. When Domino’s launched their unusual promotion, on August 31st, they probably expected just a few die-hard pizza fans to take them up on their offer, but they were inundated by hundreds of photos of fresh tattoos on social media, in the first couple of days. In an attempt to stave off the wave of tattoos and requests for free pizzas, the company had to clarify that only the first 350 people to get the tattoo – which had to be at least 2 cm (0.79 inches) in length – and post it on social media would get the 10,000 free pizzas. They also released an image clarifying the visible parts of the body where candidates could get the tattoo, but that didn’t help things too much. Read More »

A young Russian artist was recently sentenced to 11.5 years in prison for bringing home two small bottles of ayahuasca – a famous spiritual medicine prepared by indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin  – that he bought while visiting Peru. Maxim Gert, a resident of Nizhny Tagil, a city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast, had no idea that a simple souvenir he bought on a business trip to Peru could land him behind bars for over a decade. Maxim had long been suffering from back pain, and while in the South American country, someone suggested he meet one of the local shamans and try ayahuasca, a traditional spiritual medicine with known psychoactive properties. It’s unclear whether he noticed an improvement while consuming the brew in Peru, but he did decide to continue his ayahuasca treatment at home, so he took two small bottles with him on the flight home. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

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. Read More »