Fifty-two people have been killed in Kazakhstan after the bus they were travelling on caught fire.
Only five people managed to escape the burning vehicle, the interior ministry's emergencies department said in a statement.
"55 passengers and two drivers were on board. Five passengers received medical assistance. The remainder were killed," the ministry said, without elaborating on the cause of the fire.
The ministry said the apparent accident had happened at 10.30am local time, but provided no details about its cause.
The bus driver said the passengers were Uzbek nationals while the vehicle was registered in Kazakhstan, a ministry official told AFP.
He also said that the fire spread through the bus extremely quickly.
Video broadcast by Russian and Kazakh media showed black smoke and flames billowing from the vehicle on a flat stretch of road carving through a snowy steppe.
A photograph taken later showed the vehicle completely charred.
The ministry said the vehicle was a Hungarian-made Ikarus, which are still widely used in ex-Soviet nations, even though they are often decades old.
The bus was headed from the Russian city of Samara on the Volga river to the town of Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, the ministry said.
The route is widely used to transport Uzbek migrant workers to and from Russia where they often take on work on building sites.
The tragedy, which struck in the area around the city of Aktobe, came less than three years after 16 people, including three children, died in Kazakhstan when a minibus collided with a van.
