President Putin has deployed nearly 3,000 people to fight fires in Krasnoyarsk and other regions, but many affected areas are inaccessible RFSAFP/EPARussia is being urged to step up its fight against wildfires that are raging across millions of hectares of Siberia and the country’s far east. The Kremlin said that President Trump had telephoned President Putin to offer help. More than 300 fires over an area of nearly three million hectares — the size of Belgium — are burning in remote and inaccessible areas, Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service said today. Twenty-one aircraft and 2,800 people were deployed to fight fires in 116,000 hectares that could be reached in the Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk and Yakutia regions. In north Irktusk a cloud-seeding aircraft fired sticks of silver iodide into the sky in an attempt to bring rain.

Source: The Times August 01, 2019 16:07 UTC