Where Russia Has Seen the Most Snow — and Which Records Still Stand Unbroken

The winter of 2025–2026 broke several snow records at once — in Moscow and in Kamchatka alike. But on a national scale, the history of Russian snowfall runs far longer and stranger than a single unusual season.

Every January, someone on social media writes, "We've never seen snow like this." And almost every time, meteorologists politely correct them — it's happened before, more than once.

But the winter of 2026 turned out to be an exception: at several points across the country, the data genuinely exceeded long-term maximums. Let's break down where in Russia snow accumulates the most, which records are fresh, and which have stood for decades.

Kamchatka: The Country's Reigning Snow Champion

Russia's absolute leader for snow depth is the Kamchatka Peninsula, specifically its south-central region. The Nachiki and Pushchino weather stations in southern Kamchatka record the deepest snowdrifts in the country year after year.

In winter 2025–2026, Kamchatka endured its heaviest snowfall in 60 years. Several Pacific weather systems hit the peninsula back-to-back in December and January, dumping more than three months' worth of precipitation in a single month.

Alexander Shuvalov, head of the Meteo forecasting center, reported that snow depth at the Nachiki weather station reached 223 centimeters (about 88 inches), 204 cm (80 inches) in the village of Sosnovka, and 170 cm (67 inches) in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Regional authorities declared a state of emergency.

Why Kamchatka, Specifically

The mechanism is straightforward: the peninsula sits exposed to the Pacific Ocean, directly in the path of storm systems that form over warm waters and carry enormous amounts of moisture. When these air masses hit Kamchatka's mountainous terrain, they rise, cool, and release all their moisture as snow.

It's the same orographic effect that drives rainfall in the Caucasus — except here, winter temperatures sit below freezing, turning precipitation into meter-deep drifts.

Mikhail Leus, lead specialist at the Phobos weather center, explained that it was specifically the uninterrupted string of storm systems that made winter 2026 so extreme on Kamchatka: snow had no time to settle between storms, and the snowpack built up like layers of a cake.

Moscow: A Record 72 Years in the Making

Winter 2026 stood out beyond Kamchatka too. On February 20, 2026, the Moscow State University meteorological observatory recorded a snow depth of 80 centimeters (about 31 inches) — an all-time maximum across 72 years of regular measurements at that station. The previous record, 77 cm, had stood since March 26, 2013.

Mikhail Lokoshchenko, head of the MSU meteorological observatory, explained that the record resulted from an abnormal snowfall on February 19, when the storm system "Vali" dumped 24.4 mm of precipitation in a single day — more than 70% of the entire month's normal total.

Based on that day's totals, the Vnukovo district ranked among the world's top five locations for heaviest precipitation, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Even earlier, on January 9, 2026, the storm system "Francis" brought 21.4 mm of precipitation to Moscow in a single day — a snowfall that ranked among the five heaviest in 146 years of observation. Over the course of January alone, the capital broke three historical records for daily precipitation totals.

Where Russia's Snowpack Runs Consistently Highest

Kamchatka and Moscow represent two different kinds of extremes. Kamchatka leads every single year; Moscow breaks records only once every few decades. Looking at the map of consistently deep snowpack across the country, a few zones stand out:

• Southern Kamchatka (Nachiki, Pushchino) — regularly 150–220 cm (59–87 inches) by winter's end, with the 2026 record at 223 cm.
• Northern Krasnoyarsk Territory (Snezhnogorsk, Svetlogorsk, Verkhneimbatsk) — snowpack consistently above 100 cm; in 2025, Kuzmovka (Evenkia) recorded 121 cm.
• Kemerovo Oblast (Tsentralny Rudnik) — around 108 cm, where heavy precipitation combines with the terrain of the Kuznetsk Alatau range.
• Krasnaya Polyana (Sochi) — in the mountains above 1,500 meters, snowpack easily exceeds 200–300 cm, though snow along the coast itself is rare.
• Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands — Pacific storm systems operate here the same way they do on Kamchatka, with mountain-region snowpack reaching 150 cm.

Which Records Have Stood for a Long Time

Not every record gets broken regularly. Some figures were set decades ago and haven't even been approached since.

The all-time record for Moscow's single-day precipitation still belongs to January 1970, at 23 mm in one day. The January 9, 2026, snowfall (21.4 mm) came close, but didn't beat it.

The record set during the winter of 1965–1966, when snow depth in the capital reached 62–64 cm and held for weeks, remained the benchmark for half a century — until the winter of 2013 pushed it to 77 cm, and the winter of 2026 pushed it further, to 80 cm.

Tracking absolute maximum snow depths on Kamchatka is trickier: some weather stations have operated with gaps, and Soviet-era data isn't always digitized. But meteorologists themselves say the 2026 winter was the heaviest on the peninsula in 60 years — meaning at least since the mid-1960s.

Why Winter 2026 Turned Out So Snowy

Yevgeny Tishkovets, chief specialist at the Phobos weather center, explained that the winter of 2025–2026 became one of Moscow's snowiest in six decades due to a combination of factors: a series of Atlantic storm systems, sustained below-freezing temperatures (with only one brief, mild thaw across the entire two months), and high atmospheric humidity.

On Kamchatka, a different combination was at play: moisture-laden Pacific storm systems collided with frigid air flowing in from Yakutia. Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego, analyzed satellite data and confirmed that the January 12–16 snowfall on Kamchatka was abnormal in intensity even by global standards.

What This Adds Up To

Snow records aren't abstract numbers for a meteorological archive. The 2026 snowfall on Kamchatka paralyzed roads, cut power to entire villages, and forced authorities to declare a state of emergency.

In Moscow, record snowdrifts caused traffic to grind to a halt and required deploying the entire fleet of snow-removal equipment. And come spring, record snowpack carries a second risk: flooding — the more snow accumulates over winter, the more water floods into rivers when it melts.

Winter 2026 demonstrated that Russia's snow records aren't a fixed piece of history. They keep getting broken, and sharply — from Kamchatka, where snowdrifts buried the ground floors of buildings, to Moscow, where the MSU observatory recorded a snowpack taller than a person's waist for the first time in 72 years.