Russia Geography, Climate & Nature

Russia covers about seventeen million square kilometres — roughly an eighth of the world’s inhabited land — spans eleven time zones, and borders fourteen countries. It is nearly twice the size of the next largest country.

West of the Urals

The East European Plain holds Moscow, Saint Petersburg and the great majority of the population: low, rolling and crossed by the Volga, the longest river in Europe, which drains into the Caspian rather than any ocean.

The Urals and Siberia

The Ural mountains form the conventional divide between Europe and Asia. East of them lies the West Siberian Plain, one of the largest areas of flat land and wetland on earth, then the Central Siberian Plateau and the mountains of the far east. Much of it is permafrost — ground frozen year-round, covering around two thirds of the country and now thawing, which is destabilising buildings and releasing methane.

Lake Baikal

The oldest and deepest lake in the world at over 1,600 metres, holding around a fifth of the planet’s unfrozen fresh water and a set of species — including a freshwater seal — found nowhere else. It is UNESCO-listed and freezes solid in winter.

Kamchatka

A peninsula on the Pacific with around thirty active volcanoes, geysers and one of the densest brown bear populations anywhere, also UNESCO-listed.

Vegetation bands

From north to south: Arctic tundra, then the taiga — the largest forest on earth, covering more of the planet’s surface than the Amazon — then steppe in the south. Only a small share of the country is arable.

Russia is so large that generalisation fails, but most of it is continental — far from any moderating ocean — which means long, cold winters and short summers that can be genuinely hot.

European Russia

Moscow averages around −7°C in January with reliable snow cover from November to March, and 20 to 24°C in July with thunderstorms. Saint Petersburg is milder and considerably damper, with grey skies for much of the winter and the white nights in June when the sun barely sets.

Siberia

The extremes are here. Yakutsk is the coldest major city in the world, with monthly averages running from −36.9°C in January to +19.9°C in July and a record low of −64.4°C; it is also the largest city built on continuous permafrost, which is why so many of its houses stand on concrete piles. Smaller places nearby are colder still: Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on Earth, and it and Verkhoyansk are the only two permanently inhabited places in the world to have recorded temperatures below −60°C on every day of January. The same region reaches close to 20°C as a July average and well above that in a heatwave, giving the widest annual range anywhere.

The far east and the south

Vladivostok has a monsoon influence, with wet summers and dry cold winters. The Black Sea coast around Sochi is humid subtropical — palm trees, tea plantations and mild winters — which is why the Winter Olympics there needed mountains an hour inland.

The Arctic

Tundra and permafrost, with polar night in midwinter and midnight sun in summer. Murmansk, the world's largest city north of the Arctic Circle, is a non-freezing port because of the warm North Atlantic Current, and its port remains ice-free year round — which is why Russia's allies shipped military supplies there in the First World War and why it has rail and road access to the rest of Europe.

What the cold means in practice

Russian cities are built for it. Buildings are centrally heated to a degree visitors find stifling, double doors and enclosed porches are standard, and the metro doubles as a warm through-route in winter. The practical rule is layers you can shed indoors, because the difference between −15°C outside and 24°C inside is the thing that actually catches people out.

A changing picture

Russia is warming faster than the global average, and permafrost thaw is already damaging infrastructure across Siberia and the Arctic while wildfire seasons in the taiga have lengthened.

Russia's biodiversity is a function of its size and its latitude rather than of tropical richness: the species count is modest for the area, and what is remarkable is the scale of intact habitat and the number of things found nowhere else. The vegetation runs in bands from Arctic tundra through the taiga — the largest forest on earth, covering more of the planet's surface than the Amazon — to steppe in the south, with only a small share of the country arable. About two thirds of it is permafrost, which is now thawing, destabilising buildings and releasing methane.

Lake Baikal is the single most important system and one of the most extraordinary anywhere. It is the world's deepest lake at 1,642 metres, its oldest at 25 to 30 million years, and its largest by volume, holding 22 to 23 per cent of the world's fresh surface water — more than all the North American Great Lakes combined — and an estimated 19 per cent of the planet's unfrozen fresh water. It is home to thousands of plant and animal species, many endemic, and has been a World Heritage Site since 1996. It freezes solid in winter.

Kamchatka is the other. The peninsula and its surrounding belts hold around 160 volcanoes, 29 of them active, with 19 active volcanoes included in the six World Heritage sites of the Volcanoes of Kamchatka group; the highest, Klyuchevskaya Sopka, reaches 4,750 metres. Hot springs there have kept dozens of species alive that were wiped out elsewhere by the last ice age, which is an unusual reason for a place to be biologically rich.

In the Arctic, Wrangel Island and its surrounding waters have been a zapovednik — a strict nature reserve, the highest level of Russian protection, excluding virtually all human activity except conservation research — since 1976, and a World Heritage Site since 2004.

Four animals define Russian wildlife for a visitor, and they are in four different parts of a very large country.

The Amur tiger, in the Sikhote-Alin mountains of Primorsky Krai in the far east, is the conservation success story. There were 331 to 393 adults and subadults in 2005 with a breeding population of about 250; an initial census in 2015 found 480 to 540 individuals including 100 cubs, a more detailed count found 562, and as of 2022 about 756 Siberian tigers including 200 cubs were estimated to inhabit the Russian Far East. The population was eradicated from the Korean peninsula under Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945, so what survives in Russia is most of what survives at all.

The Baikal seal, or nerpa, is endemic to Lake Baikal and one of very few exclusively freshwater seals in the world. Recent estimates put it at 80,000 to 100,000 animals, roughly the lake's expected carrying capacity — a rare case of a highly restricted endemic that is not in trouble. Its main food is the golomyanka, a cottoid oilfish also found only in Baikal.

Polar bears den on Wrangel Island at the highest density of dens in the world, alongside bearded and ringed seals and walrus. Brown bears are at one of the densest concentrations anywhere on Kamchatka, where the salmon rivers support them.

Practically, none of this is casual travel. Kamchatka and Wrangel are expedition destinations where logistics dominate the cost, the far eastern tiger forests are not a wildlife-viewing industry in the way an African park is, and Baikal is the only one of the four a normal itinerary reaches — reached from Irkutsk, and at its strangest in winter when the ice is thick enough to drive on.