Телеграм канал «Translated Russian News»

❄️ A snowy kingdom in Moscow

📸 Photo by the author

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📡 Where Telegram’s servers are actually located — and who gets hired there as programmers:

SHOT has released an exclusive comment addressing one of the most widely discussed topics of recent days, focusing on the platform’s future in Russia. 📰

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⚖️ Former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov has filed a lawsuit against Russia’s Defense Ministry after being refused deployment to the combat zone as an assault fighter.

Earlier, he claimed that one of the units had agreed to include him in its ranks. All will be well! ✨

[⚠️ Context — Timur Ivanov was a senior Defense Ministry official linked to major military construction projects and later became one of the most visible defendants in corruption cases tied to the defense sector. In wartime Russia, some suspects or convicts publicly seek deployment to the combat zone, framing it as a form of personal redemption or service to the state.
⚠️ Why it matters — Requests to join combat units are increasingly perceived as a symbolic way to reset reputation and demonstrate loyalty, blurring the line between punishment and redemption. For Russian audiences, this reflects a broader shift in how military service is invoked in public discourse — less as career duty, more as moral rehabilitation.]

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🎇 China continues to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

The festive holiday period across the country will last until February 24. 🧧

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🛰️ On February 20, 1986, the Soviet Union began assembling the Mir space station in orbit.
A home, a laboratory, a factory — and at times even a would-be command center — Mir became a mirror of its era. Designed for five years, it remained in space for fifteen.

Mir was built piece by piece directly in orbit — an approach later used for the ISS. The base module was followed by Kvant, Kvant-2, Kristall, Spektr, and Priroda. By 1996, the station weighed 129 tons and carried 11.5 tons of scientific equipment from 27 countries. 🌍

Few remember that its architecture drew on the military Almaz program: a core station with modular extensions. Parts of Mir were once envisioned as a command post to oversee orbital interceptors and combat platforms, including the canceled Skif project. Crews even carried laser pistols — not for aliens, but theoretically to disable the optics of reconnaissance satellites. ⚙️

Inside, the station smelled of ozone, overheated plastic, sweat, and something like an old library. By the late 1990s, another scent appeared — dampness. A mutated mold, Cladosporium herbarum, began attacking insulation, plastic, and even window lenses.

Mir even had a shower cabin. In zero gravity, water doesn’t fall — it wraps around the body and walls. Washing felt amazing, but drying the cabin took so long that it eventually became a storage space. Cosmonauts returned to using wet towels. 🚿

In 1997, disaster struck: a fire broke out in orbit when an oxygen generator burned like a giant sparkler, blocking the path to the Soyuz escape craft. The crew fought the blaze blindly through smoke. Later that year came the first “space traffic accident” — the Progress M-34 cargo ship rammed the Spektr module. To save the station, the crew used an axe to sever cables to the depressurized compartment, leaving the American-equipped module permanently sealed. 🔧

Mir also held a vast collection of tapes and discs. Pink Floyd recorded the sound of a rocket launch for Delicate Sound of Thunder, and a cassette of the album became the first rock record in space. 🎧

Valery Polyakov spent 437 consecutive days aboard Mir. Upon landing, he walked out of the capsule himself to prove that a human could endure a journey to Mars and still move. Sergei Krikalev left Earth in May 1991 as a Soviet citizen — and returned in March 1992 to a different country after the USSR collapsed, earning the nickname “the last citizen of the Soviet Union.”

Money became a constant problem in the 1990s. At one point, Mir turned into a commercial platform: an Israeli milk advertisement was filmed onboard, a Pepsi can mock-up was flown (even though the crew drank Coca-Cola), and Japanese journalist Toyohiro Akiyama paid about $25 million for the first commercial visit. There was even a proposal from Iran to buy the station for $2 billion in oil revenue, clean out the mold, and gain access to launch-tracking systems — a deal reportedly blocked by the United States. 💼

The official reason for Mir’s demise was aging hardware. The Salyut-5B computers froze constantly, and the station was deteriorating. Unofficially, it was also a matter of funding — and a strategic shift toward the American Freedom project, later known as the ISS.

On March 23, 2001, 129 tons of history fell into the Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo — the largest graveyard of space ambitions. 🌊

Today, Roscosmos is preparing the ROSS station, and insiders say it could be adapted for military applications if needed.

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📱 Unexpectedly, school students have become the main target audience of the MAX messenger.

Teenagers are reportedly buying MAX accounts in bulk to purchase alcohol, cigarettes, and energy drinks without showing documents. 🧾 In many stores, self-checkout terminals allow age verification via a QR code from the state messenger.

According to reports, students purchase adult profiles for around 2,500–3,000 rubles, scan the code at the terminal, and complete their purchases without difficulty. ⚠️ Some even claim they’ve “never seen a better messenger.”

All will be well! ✨

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