Russian president reacts as 3m hectares burn and state of emergency covers five regions

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has called in the army to fight the forest fires that have been raging across vast expanses of Siberia for days, enveloping entire cities in black smoke.

Environmentalists have warned that the scale of the blazes could accelerate global warming, aside from any immediate effects on the health of inhabitants.

About 3m hectares (7.4m acres) of land in the centre and east of the country were on fire on Wednesday, the authorities said.

The acrid smoke has affected small settlements as well as cities in Western Siberia and the Altai region, and also the Urals such as Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg. Air travel has also been disrupted.

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“After reviewing a report from the emergency situations minister, Putin instructed the ministry of defence to join the effort to extinguish the fires,” the Kremlin’s press service told Russian media.

Approximately 2,700 firefighters were tackling the fires, Interfax news agency reported. The defence ministry told news organisations that 10 planes and 10 helicopters had been dispatched to the Krasnoyarsk region, one of the worst affected.

The Kremlin press service said the armed forces in the badly hit Irkutsk region had been put on high alert, but did not provide further details.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Destroyed woodland in Krasnoyarsk. Photograph: Kosmicheskiye Resheniya/TASS

The fires, triggered by dry thunderstorms in temperatures exceeding 30C (86F), were spread by strong winds, Russia’s federal forestry agency said.

A state of emergency has been declared in five regions. Residents have uploaded images to social media showing roads hazy with smoke and the sun barely visible.

The majority of the fires are raging in remote or inaccessible areas. The authorities make the decision to extinguish them only if the estimated damage exceeded the cost of the operation.

A petition launched on change.org a week ago calling on the authorities to do more to fight the fires has gathered more than 800,000 signatures.

Summer fires are common in Russia but this year they have spread further than usual. According to the national branch of Greenpeace, almost 12m hectares of forest have been destroyed this year, causing significant CO 2 emissions and reducing the future capacity of forest to absorb the carbon dioxide.

A spokesman for the environmental group told Echo of Moscow radio station that the involvement of the military would not drastically improve the situation.

Gregory Kuksin, who leads Greenpeace Russia’s fire prevention programme, said deploying army units to the forest could do more harm to the operation than good. He also criticised the authorities for what he said was a delayed response to the crisis.