Russia has the largest area of peatlands of all the northern circumpolar countries with the world's largest peatland being the West Siberian mire massif and the largest in Europe the Polistovo-Lovatsky mire in northern Russia. An estimate derived from the digital soil database of Russia at a geographical scale of 1:5 million, indicates that the area of soils with a peat depth of more than 30 cm is nearly 2210×10 km. Approximately 28% occurs in the zone of seasonally frozen soils, nearly 30% in the zone of sporadic and discontinuous permafrost, and 42% in the zone of continuous permafrost. Peat with a depth of more than 50 cm tends to be dominant in the Northern and Middle Taiga zones, but is uncommon in the Tundra zone.
Ongoing restoration does not seem to include paludiculture. The Wetland International together with the Institute of Forest Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Michael Succow Foundation, implemented a major peatland restoration project in response to the extensive peat fires in the summer of 2010 in the Moscow region. The project was initiated within the framework of co-operation between the Russian Federation and the Federal Republic of Germany to the spearhead the ecological rewetting of peatlands and represents one of the largest peatland ecosystem restoration projects in the world. To date, over 35,000 ha of drained peatlands have been restored using ecological methods with another 10,000 ha currently underway.