Burning Russia battles to defend nuclear sites

Russia fought a deadly battle yesterday to prevent wildfires from engulfing key nuclear sites as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took to the air in a water-bombing plane to join the fire-fighting effort.

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 over 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.

Mr 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 local 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 Mr 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 the 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.