Moscow:
Russia struggled on Friday to gain control of hundreds of wildfires raging across the country that have claimed at least 50 lives, clogged the skies with a stinging smog, snarled air travel and forced the military to transfer weapons away from a base near Moscow.
At Moscow's Domodedovo Airport dozens of flights were delayed as visibility on the runways fell to about 410 yards, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
Artillery rockets housed at the Alabinsk garrison, located near Naro-Forminsk about 45 miles southwest of Moscow, were transferred to a secure site because of the fires, a Defense Ministry spokesman said Thursday, according to a report from the Ria Novosti news service.
The local response to the wildfires drew recriminations from the Kremlin, as an aide to President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper that municipal officials would face a debriefing and be "brought to justice" if their efforts were found to be lagging, according to a report by Ria Novosti.
Local officials in Russia have faced accusations of not doing enough to prevent fires and of failing to respond adequately to the blazes. Last week, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for the resignations of local leaders who had not adequately dealt with the crisis.
Nearly 600 wildfires have been reported across Russia, with most in western and central parts of the country.
Russia is suffering from the worst heat wave since record-keeping began more than 130 years ago, accompanied by a drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat and prompted the country on Thursday to halt its grain exports for the rest of the year.
The heat wave began in mid-June, and no relief was in sight on Friday as temperatures in Moscow were forecast to remain slightly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The average daytime high for Moscow in early August is in the mid-70s.
Earlier this week, material was transferred away from a nuclear research facility in Sarov in the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 310 miles east of Moscow, as fires approached that location. The transfer of material removed any threat of potential explosions at the center, Sergei Kirienko, head of Russia's federal atomic energy agency, said, according to Ria Novosti.
The wildfires could still pose a threat of nuclear contamination if not contained, a Russian official said on Thursday. Heat from fires in the Bryansk region could release into the air harmful nuclear particles that have remained since contamination more than 20 years ago from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the emergencies minister, Sergei Shoigu, said according to news reports.
The Bryansk region is located about 250 miles southwest of Moscow.
"In the event of a fire there, radionuclides could rise together with combustion particles, resulting in a new pollution zone," Mr. Shoigu said on state television.
More than 3,000 people have been left homeless because of the fires, the government said on Thursday. Mr. Medvedev has declared a state of emergency in seven regions of the country.
Firefighters from various European nations and former Soviet republics were arriving in Russia to help firefighters battle the blazes. Russia was preparing a shelter in its Kaliningrad exclave between Poland and Lithuania to house 150 children from fire-hit central Russia, the government said.