Russia has denied reports that it has transferred a lake popular with tourists in its entirety over to neighboring Kazakhstan.
The Novosibirsk Regional Council said reports that Lake Sladkoye in the Novosibirsk region had been given over to Kazakhstan were “just idle talk.”
“How can anyone imagine we can just hand over a chunk of sovereign territory?" council deputy leader Andrei Panferov told the Kommersant newspaper.
The border between the two runs through the lake.
The BBC reported that the confusion started when the Kupino District Council asked people to keep away from the lake while border-demarcation work was being conducted.
The Kupino council website then said that "Sladkoye will lie completely in Kazakhstan once the border work is finished.”
But the regional council’s Panferov said the statement was not correct, and the comment was later deleted from the Kupino website.
The Kazakh Embassy in Moscow confirmed that control of the lake was not changing and that its border guards were simply working with their Russian counterparts to repair the frontier markers.