Party like a Russian... minister? Saratov officials caught drunk & half-naked inside state-owned car

A routine traffic stop triggered a full-scale political scandal in Russia’s Saratov region after police discovered a local minister and a young female official drunk and half-naked inside a state-issued car during his vacation.

The incident took place early in the morning on May 25, when road police stopped a vehicle travelling with its lights off. Behind the wheel was a female driver wearing an unbuttoned bodysuit, while a man, sporting only a t-shirt and boxers, was sleeping in the car’s backseat. Both of them were seemingly heavily intoxicated.

The woman, who resembled a local bureaucrat assigned to child care and wellbeing, Maria Mischenko, tried to wake up her passenger by shaking his leg and calling him “Sasha, Sasha” (short for Aleksandr) while threatening the police officers that would be “problems” when he woke up.