I can see why people think European Portuguese sounds Russian but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone say the same about Brazilian Portuguese.
I don’t think that these people heard much Russian, there’s literally nothing similar. You could say it’s sounds like Spanish, maybe Dutch or Greek even but Russian?
When I lived in The Netherlands and spoke Portuguese (with an accent from Portugal) on the phone, sometimes people asked me “What Eastern European language is that?”.
Of course that confusion only ever arises for people who are not familiar with neither Portuguese nor Slavic languages.
That said, Portuguese with a Brasilian accent totally doesn’t sound like some undefined EE language, since consonants aren’t spoken anywhere as hard as with a Portuguese accent.
