Fire, Fire!

FIRE, FIRE

The government has pledged to pay 3 million rubles ($100,000) to owners whose houses burned down in the wildfires. Putin said Monday that those who lost any other property would receive 200,000 rubles ($6,630) as compensation.

Some rural residents in the Voronezh and Vladimir regions have let the fires burn their houses in hope of getting new ones, Ekho Moskvy radio reported Monday.

Costs of damages nationwide reached 6.5 billion rubles ($215 million), Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin said Monday, Itar-Tass reported.

At least 1,862 houses were damaged by fires as of Sunday, the Regional Development Ministry said. Medvedev said Monday that more than 2,000 people have been left homeless. 

About 155,000 people were fighting fires on Monday, and another 81,000 were waiting in reserve in case the situation got worse, the Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement. Also deployed were 25,000 firefighting vehicles and 20 aircraft.

Meanwhile, the Federal Security Service opened an inquiry into a shortage of fuel for firefighting helicopters, Lifenews.ru reported, citing an unidentified source at the Emergency Situations Ministry. 

"Now it has turned out that there is hardly any fuel left for the aircraft fighting fires in the Moscow region," the source was quoted as saying. 

The report did not elaborate on what had caused the fuel shortage.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said Russians should seek to stop sinning in order to end a record drought that has stoked the fires. 

"One shouldn't think that the drought will pass if we just pray to God and then forget and fall into sin," Kirill said during a visit to the town of Lukoyanov in the Novgorod region, Interfax reported. 

He cited an Old Testament story about a drought sent on the Jews for worshipping a pagan god and said Russians should turn into "a different people" by abandoning their sins.