Ilya Varlamov
Russian freelance journalist. I explore every corner of the world, from the African deserts to the northern borders. Watch my videos to discover fascinating stories and people's lives all over the globe as they are!
For business inquiries: ilyavrlmv@varlamov.me
Ilya Varlamov
Cuba is just 90 miles from Florida. The average official salary there is about $12 a month.
Guess: how much does a gallon of gas cost at a Cuban state pump, if you can even get a slot to buy it?
The answer and what Cubans do when the pumps run dry are in the new video. 👇
https://youtu.be/K16GXxjMcgo
1 week ago | [YT] | 8
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Ilya Varlamov
In Havana, even diplomats wait in line for gas.
The Russian embassy has around 300 cars. The Cuban government lets it fuel just 5 of them a day, 20 liters each. Everyone else waits weeks for a slot in a government app, or pays up to $10 a liter on the black market.
This is what life looks like 90 miles from Florida right now. 👇
https://youtu.be/K16GXxjMcgo
1 week ago | [YT] | 4
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Ilya Varlamov
The headlines said US warships had surrounded Cuba and the government was handing out weapons to civilians.
So our friend in Havana went to the beach to check.
What he saw (and what he didn’t) is in the new video. Plus four nationwide blackouts in one summer, a train with a concrete floor, and a Soviet nuclear plant left to rot. 👇
https://youtu.be/K16GXxjMcgo
1 week ago | [YT] | 21
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Ilya Varlamov
We were packing to leave when security officers walked in and started going through our bags.
They found a drone controller. The drone itself had already been taken from me back in Uganda.
An hour later we were sitting in a "VIP cell": rusty bed, a nest of black wasps on the wall, and a TV playing… National Geographic.
Then we heard footsteps outside the door.
What happened next is at the end of the new video 👇
https://youtu.be/k_7bta74BOY
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 7
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Ilya Varlamov
A wife in South Sudan costs 100 cows.
One cow is about $300. Do the math: $30,000. That's more than a new car, in one of the poorest countries on Earth.
So how do men pay it? Their wives and sisters pan a river for gold, about $600 a month. And almost every dollar goes straight back into… more cows.
I went to see how this actually works. The full story is in the new video 👇
https://youtu.be/k_7bta74BOY
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 46
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Ilya Varlamov
Tuvalu is 26 square kilometers in the middle of the Pacific. 11,000 people. No president. Fewer than 100 police officers. Its prison has two inmates and a gate nobody bothers to lock.
The whole country earns more from its internet domain than from tourism. On Sundays, selling a single beer can cost you a $1,000 fine. And by 2100, the ocean may swallow all of it. Their plan B? Move the entire nation onto the internet.
I flew there to see how people live on a strip of land so narrow you can stand between the lagoon and the ocean in 15 steps.
Full episode is up now. Grab a coffee, it's worth the hour.
👉 [https://youtu.be/jlcQ45zYvC8
1 month ago | [YT] | 4
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Ilya Varlamov
While editing this video, I kept thinking about the wild otters I met on the waterfront. In a city where humans are fined thousands of dollars for almost everything, these little animals run completely free, stopping traffic and attracting crowds of local journalists. It's a bizarre contrast: absolute control for humans, absolute freedom for nature. That moment with the otter family made it into the film — their run across the road starts around the middle ⬇️
https://youtu.be/gdDYW8nKDG0
1 month ago | [YT] | 25
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Ilya Varlamov
A $10,000 fine for feeding a pigeon and $2,000 for walking naked in your own apartment. During my layover in Singapore, I decided to calculate exactly how much money a tourist could lose just by behaving like they do at home. It turns out, even peeing in the bushes can cost you a small fortune. How a pristine eco-utopia became a high-tech police state where everyone is constantly squealing on each other — that's what the new video is about ⬇️
https://youtu.be/gdDYW8nKDG0
1 month ago | [YT] | 13
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Ilya Varlamov
In a park in the middle of Cape Town I stood watching squirrels for ten minutes. White squirrels. Not one, not two, a whole park of them, digging through the bins, completely unafraid of people. Two hours earlier a police officer had been walking me out of a township for my own safety, and now I was arguing with a squirrel about eating out of the trash. That is this country in one afternoon: beauty and fear share the same postcode, and both feel completely normal to everyone who lives here. Curious if there is a place near you where the two sit that close together. The squirrels made it into the film, right before the part about District Six ⬇️
2 months ago | [YT] | 17
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Ilya Varlamov
Our walk through Nyanga lasted about four minutes. A police car pulled up and the officer said we would be mugged within a minute, then made us follow him to the station for an escort. In one quarter of 2024, 79 people were killed in this single township in Cape Town. Twenty kilometres away, behind razor wire, Afrikaner families pour wine for tourists in Stellenbosch. How two places that close ended up in two different centuries, that is what the new video is about: vrlmv.com/gx6fg7
2 months ago | [YT] | 40
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