Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-192.160.117.141-20140428204305

Weedle McHairybug wrote:

Back on topic your whole Tselinoyarsk question is based on unconfirmed history and thus it has never been confirmed in games. It is only speculated so far and there's no evidence to prove otherwise. Hope it puts you to rest. The closest thing to evidence in the Tselinoyarsk/Zanzibar Land question is that the Old Sun chapter of the Metal Gear Solid 4 Novelization by Project Itoh stated that they were the same place. Going to quote myself from another thread even though this is a largely irrelevant tangent, just because it's pretty interesting and I already did the research:

In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Zanzibar Land is said to be situated between the Soviet Union, China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; that essentially means it's in what's now Tajikistan. Tselinoyarsk is supposedly in the southern Soviet Union very close to Pakistan (Snake enters the region by flying through Pakistan airspace - at the time, it was a U.S. anti-Soviet ally), which also puts it in or very near to exactly the same location (northern Pakistan is not very wide). If Zanzibar Land is NOT in Tselinoyarsk, you could probably still travel from one to the other by helicopter within a day.

Coincidentally, Tajikistan has a subtropical climate, it contains mountains and deserts, and the country experienced a civil war between 1992 and 1997 (Metal Gear 2 was made in 1990 so they wouldn't have known that at the time, but Metal Gear Solid (1998) says that Zanzibar Land was formed in 1997).