They say that mother always knows best, but when a mom puts her children in irrefutable danger, we start to wonder if there’s much truth in that adage. A Russian mom’s motives are currently being questioned after police discovered her living in a snake-infested cave in a remote forest in India.
Police were on a routine patrol on July 9, 2025, when they saw a cave curtained off with bright saris. Then, a little blond girl came running out of the cave. The police followed her in and discovered Nina Kutina and her other daughter, along with some personal belongings and groceries.
“The area is popular with tourists, especially foreigners. But it has a lot of snakes and it’s prone to landslides, especially during the rainy season. To ensure the safety of tourists, we started patrolling the forests last year,” M Narayana, superintendent of police for Uttara Kannada district, told the BBC.
He went on to say that the mother insisted they were comfortable where they were and it took a lot of “convincing” to get the mom to realize where they were is dangerous
Authorities quickly discovered the mom was in India illegally with an expired visa. She reported she had four children, one, age 20, who had died, another 11-year-old son living in Russia, and her two girls. Authorities plan to repatriate Kutina and her daughters to Russia as soon as possible.
Interviews with India’s ANI and PTI news agencies revealed Kutina hadn’t lived in Russia for 15 years. She claims to have spent that time traveling to “a lot of countries, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Bali, Thailand, Nepal, Ukraine.”
Authorities tracked down the father of the two girls who alleged that Kutina left their home in Goa, India, without his knowledge and he even filed a missing persons complaint to help find them. The Israeli businessman says he wants joint custody of his kids in hopes of preventing them from having to be sent back to Russia.
While it isn’t official, the police found an idol of Panduranga Vittala, a form of Hindu god Krishna, in the cave dwelling, and is theorized she went there for prayer and meditation.
In her interview with Asian News International, she dispelled the narrative saying: “It is not about spiritually. We just like nature because it gives us health … it’s very big health, it’s not like you live in a home. We were not dying, and I did not bring my children, my daughters, to die in jungle. They were very happy, they swam in the waterfall, they had a very good place for sleeping, a lot of lessons in art making, we made from clay, we painted, we ate [well], I was cooking very good and tasty food,” she told the network.
Kutina and her girls are currently being held in a facility for undocumented Indian immigrants until they can get her settled somewhere permanently.
