Avalanche of fake snow images from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula hits social media

In January 2026, Kamchatka, a peninsula in Russia's frigid far east, faced its heaviest snowfall in 60 years, according to Reuters. The snowdrifts blocked building entrances and buried cars. At least one report referred to the astonishing snowfall as a "snow apocalypse."

Social media users posted dramatic images of what they claimed authentically showed the snow in one Kamchatka town. For example, one Instagram page posted a set of six images (archived), purportedly from Kamchatka, showing mounds of snow burying apartment buildings. The caption read:

Local authorities in Russia's #Kamchatka Peninsula have declared a state of emergency after an exceptionally severe snowstorm buried neighbourhoods, triggered rooftop avalanches, and caused fatalities. #Snow accumulation ranged from 3 to 12 metres, engulfing buildings, blocking roads, and covering vehicles and entrances, with some residential areas nearly buried under towering snowdrifts.

Although heavy snowfall is common in Kamchatka, this #storm has exceeded historical norms, leaving cities partially paralysed. Power outages, cancelled flights, supply disruptions, and limited emergency access have raised serious safety concerns as residents struggle to dig out amid freezing conditions.

The first photo seemed to show a half-collapsed mountain of snow dwarfing apartments, while others depicted snowdrifts appearing like sand dunes burying other buildings.

Numerous Instagram and Threads users posted the same, or similar, collections of pictures, while other people posted videos featuring the same imagery.

In short, the first four images in the initial Instagram post were generated using artificial intelligence software, the fifth was first posted online before the Kamchatka snowstorm and was likely AI-generated, while the sixth was unlikely to be from Kamchatka. Real photos from the city during and after its January 2026 snowstorm were much less dramatic but still stunning.

Origin of first four images

The first four images of the first Instagram post originated from post (archived) by Threads user @ibotoved on Jan. 17, 2026. The caption, in Russian, read: "Kamchatka today according to Threads." The user commented on multiple posts that shared the images, claiming to have created them. He also replied (archived) to some comments under his original post and others' posts by saying the images were AI-generated.

Days later, the account posted a screen recording (archived) showing how the user used AI to generate the images. That post's caption (translated from Russian to English): "When a prank went beyond reason. Millions believed the unrealistic footage, even though everything was obvious. In short, 'How Kamchatka Was Made.'"

While @ibotoved wrote the prompt in Russian, the English translation (using Google) read: "A photo of a Russian city with high-rise buildings covered in snow. The snow is abnormally thick, higher than the rooftops. Let the drifts be as big as houses." The results shown in the video, which was a later recording and not from when the user originally created the images, resembled the widely shared AI-generated images.

There were numerous signs the first four images were AI-generated. The buildup of the snow, particularly in the case of the half-collapsed snow mountain, was unnatural and there was no visible damage on the buildings from the enormous piles of weighty snow crushing them. Some of the windows visible in the images were also unrealistically deformed — AI image generators often struggle with small, repetitive details in larger images. 

An image generator struggled with realistically depicting the windows on the fourth and fifth floors of this apartment building. (TikTok user @ibotoved)

Snopes analyzed Google Street View images of the peninsula's main city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and did not find clusters of buildings matching those seen in the first four images

Origin of fifth and sixth images

The fifth and sixth images of the Instagram post did not originate from @ibotoved's Threads post. While it was not possible to confirm the exact source of either, the fifth was not from the January 2026 Kamchatka snowstorm and was likely AI-generated, while the sixth was also unlikely a real image from Kamchatka.

The fifth image

The fifth image showed a snowdrift climbing several stories high, nearly reaching the top of a single apartment building about nine or 10 stories high. A reverse image search revealed at least two instances of the image being posted on Jan. 11, 2026, days before the winter storm rocked Kamchatka.

One of those images was an Instagram post (archived) without a caption, although there appeared to be text at the top of the image that was cut. A Facebook account linked to the Instagram account placed the user in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The other Jan. 11 version of the fifth image, which was posted to TikTok (archived), included the full text at the top, written in Russian, that translated to: "Minsk is covered in snow…" Minsk is the capital of Belarus, a country to the west of Russia and north of Ukraine.

It was not clear whether this image was meant to represent Minsk, but numerous windows depicted in it appeared to be missing or warped, suggesting that it was also AI-generated.

The sixth image

The final image looked up at a looming snow pile half-burying one window of an apartment building that had at least one floor above and had outer walls that looked like tiling.

It was not possible to confidently determine its origin using a reverse image search.

The oldest examples of it being posted were from Jan. 17, just after the storm in Kamchatka ended. On that date, several foreign news sites, particularly Turkish-language sites, shared that image alongside other photos featuring watermarks for @havaforum.

Hava Forum is a non-official Turkish meteorological forum. Between its X account and the forums themselves, the oldest version of that image that could be found was an X post (archived). Neither the X post nor a forum post featuring the image cited any sources for where it came from.

It was not possible to find any Russian-language sources posting an older version of the image.

Between the lack of sourcing for the image's origin and the lack of a Russian-posted version of the image prior to its appearance on a Turkish forum, it was unlikely that this was a genuine image from the January 2026 Kamchatka snowstorm.

AI-detection tool results

Snopes ran all six images through Hive Moderation, an AI-detection tool. Hive rated four of the first five images from the Instagram post to have a 100% likelihood of being AI-generated, while the fourth had a 99.4% likelihood of being AI-generated. Hive's tool determined that there was just under a 50% likelihood that the sixth image was AI-generated. 

AI-detection tools make mistakes and are therefore not 100% accurate. They cannot confirm or rule out that an image was AI-generated, although it may support stronger evidence that an image was created this way.

What the snow in Kamchatka really looked like

On Jan. 20, the Kamchatka government meteorological agency published a report saying that nearly 5.4 meters (about 18 feet) of snow had fallen on Kamchatka's capital city between December and the first half of January. The December snowfall was more than triple the monthly average for the city. Most of the January snowfall was from a single cyclone that hit the city between Jan. 13 and Jan. 16. In that time, it dumped 1.3 meters (more than 4 feet) of snow, which was enough to surpass the average snowfall of the entire month (all details can be found on Page 3).

The Moscow Times, an English-language independent news outlet in Russia, reported on Jan. 19 that the average height of the snow in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky reached 1.7 meters (roughly 5.5 feet) with drifts in some neighborhoods exceeding 2.5 meters (more than 8 feet).

Therefore, none of these heights were large enough for the snowdrifts in the Instagram post to be real.

Numerous news agency photos of Kamchatka's capital following the Jan. 16 cyclone supported The Moscow Times' estimates of the snowdrift heights. Photos captured by Getty Images and AFP, a French international news agency, showed snowdrifts burying cars and the first story of some buildings. Photos from the two largest Russian state-owned news agencies, TASS and RIA Novosti, similarly showed snowdrifts reaching no higher than the second story of buildings and locals quickly working to clear roads of snow piles. 

Videos from The Associated Press and the Russian government, which shared clips of rescuers digging out tunnels to help elderly people stuck in their homes with buried entrances, also supported this less-apocalyptic version of Petropavlovsk.

Therefore, any media shared online of snowdrifts reaching several stories high can be safely treated with skepticism.