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Fact check: Are these images of Russian 'snow apocalypse' real?
he heaviest snowfall in the area in 60 years buried cars and resulted in vast snowdrifts several metres high blocking building entrances
- PUBLISHED: Thu 22 Jan 2026, 10:40 AM UPDATED: Thu 22 Jan 2026, 11:04 AM
Russia's Kamchatka region, a peninsula on the far eastern side of the country, faced a massive snowstorm this week. According to Reuters, on Tuesday, the heaviest snowfall in the area in 60 years buried cars and resulted in vast snowdrifts several metres high blocking building entrances.
The effect was felt in China and Japan as well, with disrupted flights and snowfall in Shanghai. The whole phenomenon has been dubbed as Russia's "snow apocalypse" in the media and online.
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Videos and photos from Kamchatka started flooding social media, with residents playing in the snow, shovelling their way out of their homes and bringing in equipment to clear roads and pathways.
Real or fiction?
However, the Internet being what it is, the images and videos soon started to take on a strange, almost dream-like quality. People were seen skiing down giant mountains of snow, exiting their apartment buildings through windows. People jumped out of windows into vast expanses of white below, landing in a satisfying thump cradled by the soft snow.
A viral video claiming that it was "not AI" showed rows of housing covered in the avalanche and vehicles moving slowly down a road flanked by walls of snow.
Images showed looming, ominous structures of snow arching over apartment buildings, as if caught in a wave.
Upon closer inspection, the videos and photos are clearly AI-generated. The buildings wobble and snow does not behave in the way it should. Accuweather pointed out that the videos and photos are supposed to come from a small town in Kamchatka, which would not have 10-storey buildings as seen in the more fantastic skiing videos.
The weather service also pointed out that the slope and nature of the snow on which people are "skiing" defies laws of physics, with the residents travelling way too quickly and without any sinking.
The actual situation in Kamchatka
The Reuters video below — showing real conditions on the ground — clearly features shorter buildings and individual houses that are more characteristic of small towns around the world. There are no reality-defying snow mountains outside the apartments, only snow banks that cover building entrances and the lower floors.
Scientists said the weather was related to waves of cool air coming in from the Arctic, which was simultaneously affecting Eastern Russia and Asia, and a second, affecting Eastern Europe.
Some vehicles were almost completely submerged, four-wheel drives struggling for traction or immobilised entirely, as residents dug narrow paths through the snow to reach apartment entrances. In the port city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, locals were filmed walking atop snowbanks beside traffic lights, with some jumping from the drifts for fun.
While the snowstorm in Russia was real and people did make the best of a difficult situation, enjoying themselves while jumping into the snow and letting their dogs frolic, the more magical looking scenarios were exactly that — a fantasy.
As AI becomes smarter and more accurate at mimicking reality, a quick fact-check while seeing anything viral may need to be the norm moving forward.
