Putin takes to skies in firefighting water-bombing plane
Two soldiers were killed by blazing trees as they strove to put out a fire dangerously close to Russia’s main nuclear research centre, while workers were also mobilised to fight blazes near a nuclear reprocessing plant.
After almost two weeks of fires that have claimed more than 50 lives and part destroyed a military storage site, the authorities said they were making progress in fighting fires that still covered 174,035 hectares of land.
Putin visited the Ryazan region south of Moscow, one of the worst hit, and jumped into a Be-200 jet to scoop up water from lakes and then dump it on the fires, state media said.
State television showed the Russian strongman, headphones clamped against his ears, confidently taking the co-pilot’s controls as the plane zoomed over the water.
“We hit it!” exclaimed Putin as his colleagues confirmed the water had hit the target.
The emergencies ministry said that over the last 24 hours, 247 new fires had appeared, more than 239 had been put out, and 557 fires were still raging across the affected region.
The authorities have come under pressure to explain the magnitude of effects of the heatwave, which meteorologists have said is the worst in the 1,000-year history of Russia.
The head of forestry for the Moscow region, Sergei Gordeichenko, has been sacked after President Dmitry Medvedev noted he had stayed on holiday as the fires burned, a spokesman said.
“He was awaited but he never came... Why do we need such forest specialists? Let them take their holidays on the Canary Islands,” Medvedev said yesterday.
Two members of the Russian armed forces were killed on Monday fighting wildfires around Russia’s main nuclear research centre in Sarov, a town in the Nizhny Novgorod region still closed to foreigners as in Soviet times.
Rifle battalion member Vasily Tezetev, 22, “died the death of a hero” on Monday while dealing with the fire burning in a nature reserve close to the town, the local emergency centre said yesterday, Interfax reported.
Another serviceman, named as Vasily Veshkin, 27, who usually worked at a local prison camp, also died fighting the fire on the same day, it added. Both were killed when they were hit by burning parts of trees that fell to the ground.
Meanwhile, officials said fires burning within 15km of Snezhinsk in the Urals, home to another of Russia’s top nuclear research centres, had been reduced to a five-hectare area and there was no risk for the town.
Forecasters said the air quality was still dangerously poor.
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