<flame suit on>
I hesitate to post this but...
If you read up on the works of Tesla, Shauberger, and other great minds in areas of power and physics, it's not hard to see that weather control using high energy devices would have to have been at least tried.
Who would try it? Well the Russians have often thought way outside the box compared to the US in technologies of this sort. Good example is frequency medicine they used during their race with us on space travel. They really dumped big bucks into how to treat the body in space with electrical frequencies where huge pharmacies and other allopathic gear could not go. It's not hard to believe they would not have at least tried to point that stuff at the sky...
After all, the country that can control the weather would have a huge tactical advantage over the rest. Actually huge would be an understatement..think about it. Look at the effects of weather on wars in the past, even the recent past. For all our technology, we are still Nature's Biotch.
So, whether it is true or not, I think there is a solid argument that there is definitely huge motive, basic principles behind the possibility that it could work, and definitely the time in the past few decades to research it by a huge country such as Russia.
<additional flame suit put on>