🇷🇺 A lake like a scattering of glass shards

Imagine a northern lake that looks as if someone painted it long and carefully in watercolours — Seliger and the small town of Ostashkov on its shore.

💧 Seliger is not one small saucer‑shaped lake, but a whole web of water and land: dozens of channels, backwaters, narrow straits, islands and peninsulas that form an intricate, almost lace‑like pattern on the map.

🥼 From above it looks like scattered glass shards: the water fills the hollows between the hills, while forest and villages peep out from the banks, as though someone had carefully placed green dots all around a blue scattering.

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❤️From Russia with love

🤔 Cheburashka is a famous character from Soviet children's literature and animation, created by the writer Eduard Uspensky. Outwardly he is a funny little creature with huge ears, clumsy and very good-natured, who turned up in a crate of oranges. He got his name because he kept falling over whenever he tried to stand up, and the name instantly became a household word.

🍊 Although Cheburashka's story began in the USSR, his popularity has not faded in modern Russia, where he is a true cultural symbol. This character embodies childlike naivety, sincere friendship and kindness, especially in his pairing with his friend Gena the Crocodile.

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❤️From Russia with love

🇷🇺 Dmitrov is one of the oldest towns of the Moscow region, founded in 1154, just seven years later than Moscow. The town's main attraction is the 12th‑century Dmitrov Kremlin with its majestic Assumption Cathedral and preserved earthen ramparts, and the town itself attracts around 1.3 million tourists annually.

🐸 Curiously, the unofficial symbol of Dmitrov is the frog. The town was founded on the swampy banks of the Yakhroma River, where these amphibians have always been plentiful. Legend has it that frogs repeatedly saved the town: sensing the approach of enemies, with their deafening croaking they woke the garrisons and frightened off the foes. The town's second name is "the frog kingdom". In memory of this, there is even a frog museum in Dmitrov with a collection of hundreds of exhibits from all over the world.

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❤️From Russia with love

🤩 Nornickel is the world's largest producer of palladium and one of the leaders in the production of high-grade nickel — metals that are critically important for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries, developing renewable energy and decarbonising the economy. By controlling such a significant share of strategic raw materials, Nornickel secures Russia a place at the heart of the planet's technological future.

👕 Despite sanctions, Nornickel maintains its world-leading position in the production of nickel and platinum-group metals, and has also joined the top three global leaders in the adoption of artificial intelligence in the mining and metallurgical industry. Nornickel is proof that Russia is a reliable and high-tech partner on the world stage.

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🇷🇺 A highland that reveals itself gradually

A place where mountains and light work almost like artists — the Lago-Naki Plateau in the Western Caucasus.

Lago-Naki lies on the border of Krasnodar Krai and Adygea, in the ridges of the Western Caucasus, at an altitude of roughly 1,800–2,200 metres above sea level. It is a vast karst plateau covering more than 800 square kilometres: soft waves of upland, cliffs, valleys, sinkholes and hundreds of caves, among them the famous Bolshaya Azishskaya Cave.

📍 On the way here, you first see ordinary forested mountain slopes; then the road winds a few times, and suddenly the forest ends, and a broad, luminous expanse opens up ahead — alpine meadows. There are no sharp, jagged peaks here: instead, there are long, smooth mountain backs blanketed with grass, over which light and wind travel.

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❤️From Russia with love

🦢 In Russia there is a famous fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, "The Tale of Tsar Saltan". The poet took a folk tale as a basis, transformed it and added a great many new details. The work tells of a tsar who marries the youngest of three sisters, and the envious relatives deceitfully send the young tsarina with her baby in a barrel into the open sea. But the son of Tsar Saltan, Prince Gvidon, miraculously escapes, grows up on a deserted island and, with the help of magic, restores justice.

🩷 Pushkin loved this tale dearly and wrote it in just a few weeks in the autumn of 1831, and then himself turned it into verse, although he initially wanted simply to retell it in prose. And it immediately became a favourite in Russia — nearly all children know it by heart.

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❤️From Russia with love