The wildfires that have been raging in Russia are finally beginning to relent. While at one point there were as many as 21 fires covering roughly 866 hectares, most Russian regions now report a dramatic drop - in Khakassia alone all wildfires are reported extinguished (as of 9/13). Not all battles have been won, however; there are still many displaced people and disrupted services that need to be attended to, enough that some places are still in an official state of emergecny (13 districts in the Altai Territory, for example).Battles on the civic front, too, are still being waged. As more and more Russian regions report the end of forest fires, more and more finger-pointing and new proposals are popping up. Investigations on behalf of the federal government have come up with nine cases of negligence (and counting) against local forest monitoring in more than half a dozen regions, including Altai, Volgograd, and Moscow. Stakes are running high enough that in Volgograd several officials have already resigned, citing damage caused by fires as the reason (9/6). And at the opening day of the State Duma, Russia's Emergency Situation Minister (Sergei Shoigu) blamed regional governments for the extensive damage caused by wildfires. Not only, according to him, should visitors have been prohibited from going into drought-stricken areas susceptible to burning, but in addition the regional governors should have been quicker to call in firefighting planes and federal assisstance when fires began.
But that's just the problem. In 2006, a policy overhaul replaced the federal Soviet-era forest protections (which were quite extensive) with an infastructure that many officials now are pointing out is incapable of looking after forests across a huge nation. With the Duma in session, President Medvedev has told the press that he is hoping for reform of forest protection policies, and is willing to step in and use his authority to entirely overhaul the system if a working plan does not emerge. (Medvedev has also recently put plans for a major highway on hold to consider environmental aspects, reminding companies that forest damage must be considered - though, of course, economics will still be central - and citing the pristine quality of forests in Russia's European neighbors as something to aspire to.) While Medvedev has been the voice for reform and bringing up Russia's youth in an environmental state of mind, Prime Minister Putin (with whom most of the final authority on the forests lies, under the current legislation) has been widely publicized visiting fire-stricken towns and co-piloting fire-fighting aircraft (see picture above). Putin has yet to make any substantial statements about the federal politics involved in forest protection - and Medvedev, his protege, has yet to challenge him on the issue.
From ITAR-TASS, a federally owned Russian newspaper:
From the Moscow Times:
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