Russian fire-fighters on Sunday battled the flames from spreading forest fires that have already killed 30 people, destroyed thousands of homes and mobilised hundreds of thousands of emergency workers. The emergency situations ministry said Sunday that forest fires had engulfed more than 128,500 hectares across Russia.
It mobilised almost 240,000 emergency workers to fight the blazes, along with 2,000 members of the armed forces. "The situation has taken a sharp turn for the worse," the ministry said, blaming temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius and strong winds, while insisting everything was under control.
It said that more than 5,000 people had been evacuated from their homes. Two more bodies were found Sunday in a burnt-out village in the Nizhny Novgorod region, the emergency ministry's regional branch said, raising the official death toll to 30. In the Voronezh region, one of those worst-hit, almost 600 people have been left homeless, Russian television reported, showing residents evacuated to a hotel and volunteers bringing bags of clothes.
"There has never been a fire like this," fireman Maxim Korolyov told AFP in the village of Maslovka, where all but five of the 150 houses burnt down on Friday. "It's the first time I have had to fight a fire of this size.
Elderly resident Vera Sakharova complained that fire-fighters had come too late. "We did not have any help," she told AFP. "We had to do everything ourselves."
Sceptical of promises of state help, Sakharova predicted: "They have given us nothing, and they won't give us anything." "I don't know what we are going to do after this," she added.
At least 1,875 houses have been destroyed in fires, leaving more than 2,000 people homeless, the regional development ministry said Sunday. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised on television on Saturday that all the houses would be rebuilt by October, after allocating five billion rubles (165 million dollars).
The strongman leader on Friday visited a village in the worst affected Nizhny Novgorod region. In a televised encounter, tearful residents confronted Putin, who promised to rebuild their homes and embraced one of the women.