Putin Sends Military to Fight Wildfires Raging in Siberia

(Bloomberg) -- President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian military to help battle wildfires burning across a territory the size of Belgium after record high temperatures turned huge patches of forest into a tinderbox.

Russia has declared a state of emergency in four Siberian districts because of the fires, following mounting pressure to act as plumes of smoke visible from space stretched across the region to the Urals mountains thousands of miles away. Putin told the Defense Ministry to join the fight after a meeting with Emergencies Minister Yevgeny Zinichev, the Kremlin said Wednesday.

The mobilization marks a reversal from the hands-off approach that allowed the fires to spread during a hot summer in which June temperatures in the affected regions were about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) above the 30-year average from 1981 to 2010. There were efforts to fight just 107,000 hectares (264,400 acres) of blazes out of a total of 3 million hectares that were burning Wednesday, according to Russia’s Federal Forestry Agency.

Greenpeace Russia spokesman Andrey Allakhverdov said the fires are on track to be the worst since the government eased rules on containing blazes in 2015, when it created zones of control in which the authorities were effectively allowed to ignore conflagrations that didn’t threaten to damage property or lives.

“Due to climate change, we’re seeing a much higher frequency of extreme weather events,” said Oksana Tarasova, head of the World Meteorological Organization’s Atmospheric Research and Environment Department in Geneva. “We’ve seen longer periods without precipitation and with higher temperatures that create the ideal conditions for these fires.”

More than 800,000 people have signed a petition calling for a state of emergency across Siberia that was started by a native of Tomsk, a city some 700 kilometers (435 miles) from the epicenter of the fires that has been cloaked in smoke for much of July.

Tarasova said emissions from the fires, which were on par with the annual output of a small country, were less a concern than the destruction of forests that serve as vital carbon storage sinks for the planet.

--With assistance from Stepan Kravchenko.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jake Rudnitsky in Moscow at jrudnitsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Torrey Clark at tclark8@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin, Gregory L. White

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