Fascinating devices! I used to live in Alaska but I never saw such a thing. It wouldn't be better than a snowmobile for most projects, but as a sort of small snow
tractor, the Russian one at least might be very useful in heavy terrain where a snowmobile cannot go or would be too risky. And the Canadian one seems to be electric, which would make it awesome for purposes where loud engine noise is unwelcome.
As for the Russian one:
For my sins, one of my double majors (at the college that is now chasing me for donations in connection with the 25th reunion I won't be attending) was Russian language, and I did a study abroad in the spring of 1988 at Moscow Steel and Alloy Institute in the USSR. I could sorta speak and read Russian then, but a quarter-century later it's mostly long gone. However, with the aid of Google translate I can usually puzzle stuff out. -ики is a plural suffix, singular -ик, that often means "person who does a thing" and which I suspect just means "thing that does the thing" here. So my best guess at the translation of that word is simply "motor-tractors".
Another word used on that page is Мотособаки -- literally "motordogs" but I would translate it as "iron dogs" which is a metaphor used in Alaska to mean snowmobiles. Edited to say: it looks like the Russians are translating it as "SnowDogs" which is not literal but which is practical and expressive.
The website offers a bit more detail, but it's pasted in photoshop on flash images that rotate by and can't be seen by Google translate. For pedagogical purposes I grabbed some of those images and pasted them up into a thing we can point at for discussion:
My rough translations -- very rough! -- are as follows:
1) Motor-tractor Baltmotors Barboss mini with Honda engine -- 49,900 rubles
2) Better (easier?) ice fishing!
3) Motortractors: Irondogs Barboss - irreplaceable assistants for fishermen and hunters, can engine-walk across snow, ice, marsh and rough terrain
4) Ideal solution for Russian winters! Motortractors Baltmotor Barboss from 43,800 rubles.
What I'm seeing in those two photos is probably the best use for the device. If you want to cross unreliable ice, standing in a boat that's towed by your iron dog is not a bad way to do it; even if the dog falls through the ice, your boat won't, and you can probably recover the iron dog.
After writing all this I went to do a bit more research on Baltmotors Barboss and discovered they have a perfectly fine English website
here. Doh!
From that website:
Baltmotors offers a unique product for the European market — Russian-developed snow vehicle — the ‘SnowDog’.
The Motodogs are designed to carry passengers and compact cargoes on frozen water surfaces as well as on snow. They provide excellent maneuverability and operational simplicity requiring no extra skills from the driver.
That explains why I never saw anything like this in the US, since Baltmotors has only been around since 2004. If you go to that page, they have full contact information for a product manager in Kaliningrad who could probably put you in contact with a North American importer, assuming any such exists. But Google doesn't leave me optimistic.
However I did find this amusing
video of a chelovek having way too much fun with his SnowDog, to the music of ZZ Top. The chief flaw I see is that the device seems to lack much of a steering mechanism; the operator seems to just lever it in the desired direction by yanking on the handle bars, which seem lightly-designed for that purpose. I've done a lot of snowmobile freighting and it's astonishing how quickly stuff breaks under those conditions. But this is fun to watch anyway:
YouTube will suggest a bunch of similar videos for you once you've watched that one.
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