Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed on Thursday that parts of Lake Sladkoe in southern Siberia had evaporated, silencing outcries the lake had been gifted to neighboring Kazakhstan.



"Residents were accustomed to the border being somewhere in the middle of the lake," a spokesman for Novosibirsk’s FSB press service was cited as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. “But the lake has now dried out so much that the shore aligns with the [Kazakhstan] border.”

Nestled on the Russian-Kazakh border in Novosibirsk’s Kupinsky district, Lake Sladkoe straddles both countries.

Baffled by the lake’s disappearance from Russian territory, the Kupinsky administration issued an official statement on Aug. 10 that read, “Lake Sladkoe is now in Kazakhstan.”