Russia battles forest fires amid another hot summer

YAKUTSK, Russia (Reuters) -Russia's state forest agency said it was fighting 222 separate blazes across 20 regions on Thursday as an unusually hot summer fuels forest fires, after millions of hectares of woodland were destroyed in recent years.

States of emergency were in force in the far eastern Yakutia and Zabaikalsky regions because of forest fires, the Federal Forest Management Agency said.

More than 5,000 people were fighting fires across Russia, the agency said in a statement published on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia has been hit by increasingly damaging forest fire seasons in recent years, which experts say are driven by rising temperatures caused by climate change.

The Earth Touches Everyone, an independent environmental group, said in a statement that official data showed that 8.8 million hectares (21.7 million acres) had been destroyed so far this season as of July 17.

The group had predicted that the 2024 fire season would likely be worse than those of 2022 and 2023, it said, adding that "alas, this prognosis has come true".

In Yakutia, a remote and heavily forested region around the size of Texas, local media reported that blazes had engulfed more than 930 hectares of land and had come within 10 km (6.2 miles) of Belaya Gora, a village of 2,000 people in the region's northeast.

Yakutia has been repeatedly ravaged by fires in recent years. Emergency services had brought fires in three of the region's districts under control, authorities said.

(Reporting by ReutersWriting by Felix LightEditing by Andrew Heavens and Frances Kerry)