Raging wildfires are engulfing Stalin’s notorious Road of Bones in the world’s coldest inhabited region.
Record temperatures have seen more than 300 infernos ablaze in Yakutia, an area of Siberia famous for diamonds.
Videos show the scenes around Khandyga on the Road of Bones, a highway linking the planet’s coldest city Yakutsk with the old Gulag port of Magadan.
The road – one of the most remote in the world – was built by political prisoners during the Stalin era, costing the lives of a quarter of a million people.
All the fires in the region are raging on permafrost – permanently frozen ground.
Today there were descriptions of “hellish-looking scenes” with the road shut for at least 25 miles by wildfires and choking smoke.
(Image: The Siberian Times)
The wildfire crisis in Yakutia was so bad that the Russian emergency services deployed a Antonov-26 cloud-spiking plane in three districts to trigger rain.
Using Soviet technology, clouds are laced with a chemical cocktail of weather-changing silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and dry ice.
The system was historically used to ensure blue skies at military parades on Red Square, but this region – covered by snow throughout the winter – has become parched in the scorching heat.
(Image: The Siberian Times)
Several thousand firefighters are seeking to counter the flames, and they won praise for their work in a televised question and answer session from Vladimir Putin.
“We can’t see the sun because of the smog, flakes of ash are raining from the sky. We are struggling to breathe, we really need help,” said a resident from Udarnik village in Tomponsky district.
Temperatures as high as 39C have been recorded on the land surface in a region that straddles the Arctic Circle.
(Image: The Siberian Times)
Roman Vilfand, Russia’s chief weather expert, said Yakutia will be one of July’s ‘weather hotspots’ with readings of 6C above the norm.
With Siberia registering higher temperatures than Dubai this summer, some wildfires have burned underground in peat as zombie blazes all through the famous Russian winter when temperatures drop to minus 60C.
A meeting was told Russia is experiencing the hottest conditions “since the 19th century” with no sign of it abating.
(Image: The Siberian Times)
It comes after an Arctic village in Yakutia was encircled by “out of control” tundra infernos last year.
Locals in besieged Svatay begged for assistance in a major flare-up of wildfires in the region.
Apocalyptic pictures showed flames and smoke in remote districts of the diamond-mining territory.
Residents including children and the elderly built “wide strips of mineral soil to prevent the fire from reaching the village”, reported The Siberian Times.
A video from another village of Aleko-Kyuyol showed men fighting fire in a cloud of smoke with basic backpack fire extinguishers.
A settlement in the Tomponsky district of Yakutia also had a wildfire on its doorstep, according to reports.