One region alone - Yakutia - has 5 million tons scrap metal dumped in polar regions, an ugly Soviet legacy.
Overnight ice rain and north winds turned Vladivostok, Russia's Pacific capital, and most of the Primorye region into a frozen land with hundreds of power lines cut by wet snow. The storm left 120,000 people without electricity and many without heating and water.
Facilities for producing weapons grade plutonium believed safe despite fierce flames caused by wildfires.
Some 5.4 million hectares of land are ablaze across Russia, mostly in Siberia and the country's far east. Water sprayed by planes to fight the fires is ‘now as expensive as Champagne’.
Cries to urgently call state of emergency in Irkutsk region as it chokes in smoke.
Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia - or the Sakha Republic - the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerizing. There are some 300 separate fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometers - but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose a threat to people. The rest are burning unchecked.
Even school children are in firefighting brigades in some areas of Yakutia.
Father missing under snow; more than 200 people continue search and rescue at -23C, snowstorm and bleak light of polar night.
Omsk region reported ‘record high’ number of wildfires and cases of dry grass burning, that turn into wildfires this spring, with one day last week counting nearly a thousand new events a day. Omsk region emergency services said the number of wildfires is seven to ten times above the norm.
Video shows hero climbers manually breaking ice off its cable stays at height of 324m (1,063ft) in Vladivostok.
A new study has warned of the risk to buildings in urban areas across Russia's permafrost zone caused by climate change. The Russian-US analysis says a worst-case scenario could lead to a 75-95% 'reduction in bearing capacity throughout the permafrost region by 2050'.
Arctic permafrost is degrading much faster than expected, warn scientists from the extreme north of Yakutia. It took two years for a building in the port town of Chersky on the Kolyma River, to snap in the middle after the once solid permafrost could no longer hold its supporting foundation.
The fires are now raging some 10 to 15 kilometers from the megaslump crater - a large hole in the frozen Arctic soil which highlights the dramatic speed of thawing permafrost.
Dry conditions fuel dozens of fires and result in a state of emergency across the Siberian Federal District.
Intense rainfall in Russia's Far East Primorye region caused floods, power outages, and evacuations, with water levels exceeding the norm by eightfold in some areas, following previous flooding caused by tropical storm Khanun.
The Kostanai Region declared a state of emergency on Sept. 4 after forest fires burned a record 43,000 hectares (the size of Сarribean Barbados island) and forced an evacuation of 1,841 people.
As experts are expecting that the water level of the Meuse river will continue to rise until noon and the water has starting flowing over the dyke, the mayor of Maaseik in the Limburg province urged people to stay away.
Two people were killed after a torrent of water poured over a cofferdam in northwestern Russia early Monday and flooded the surrounding area, authorities said.
President Vladimir Putin declared a state of emergency last Wednesday, several days after 21,000 metric tons of diesel leaked from a collapsed fuel tank outside the city of Norilsk.The pollution now risks running north into the Arctic Ocean.
Northern Afghanistan devastated by flash floods, 315 dead, 1,600 injured. Thousands of homes damaged, livestock lost. Villagers lack essentials.
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