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Russia

A Year After Massive Fires, Is Russia Burning Again?

Greenpeace disputes the Russian government’s forest fire statistics in the region around Moscow. The controversy is especially charged following last summer’s blazes that decimated agriculture and killed hundreds when huge plumes of smoke blew into the ca

A smoky view of central Moscow last August (Ulishna)
A smoky view of central Moscow last August (Ulishna)
Ivan Buranov

MOSCOW - All the fires raging around the Moscow region have been extinguished, and all new blazes that spring up are put out as soon as they are discovered. That, at least, is the view of the Russian government's Emergencies Situations Ministry and the Federal Fire Service.

But environmentalists insist many fires are still flaring up that the authorities are hiding, including blazes that continue to rage in the Vladimir and Ryazan regions adjacent to Moscow. And very soon, the activists say, a smoky smog will envelop the capital as it did last summer.

Last August, hundreds of deaths were blamed on respiratory failure linked to the smoke from the worst Russian wild fires in memory, also responsible for the widespread destruction of crops that cost some $15 billion in damages.

As August approaches, attention to the severity of wild fires – which tend to occur each summer – is higher than ever. The Emergency Situations Ministry told deputy prime minister Viktor Zubkov that in a recent 24-hour period, there had been 12 forest and peat fires, but they had all been quickly extinguished.

But Greenpeace Russia says the situation is not quite so rosy. The head of its fire information service Gregory Kuksin said in the area surrounding Moscow, there were at least ten large fires, mostly in the Shatura region. Some of the fires have been raging for weeks.

Kuksin said on the whole, local authorities are reacting swiftly, but real information is for some reason being hushed up. He added that many of the forest fires are burning along the boundary of the Moscow region.

A Greenpeace Russia team arrived Tuesday morning to put out a peat bog fire in a town in the Vladimir region. The wind was blowing the smoke towards Moscow.

Active fires on the rise

On Monday, residents in the southeast of the capital reported that they could smell smoke, but Russia's meteorological service insisted this was not due to burning peat.

Across the rest of Russia, however, the situation is worrying. The Emergency Situations Ministry says the number of active fires has increased by 20 percent over the last 24 hours, from 167 to 206, affecting an area of 11 thousand hectares.

The worst affected areas are the regions of Yakutia, Komi, Khabarovsk and Archengelsk. Zubkov has demanded firefighting equipment be more quickly deployed to the outlying regions, pointing out that $100 million had been set aside for this after last year's disaster.

But the deputy prime minister also added that it was still necessary to find and punish those responsible for violating the norms in effect to prevent the tinderbox conditions of dry land and brush that tends to ignite the fires. Reports into administrative violations have been compiled and investigators are looking into more than 400 cases.

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photo - Ulishna

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Society

How Italy's "Conscientious Objector" Doctors — De Facto — Limit Abortion Rights

Italy decriminalized abortion in 1978, but the law allows for doctors to conscientiously object. And so many do that it makes it difficult for many women to access health care when they need it most, with some turning to unsafe abortions.

Photo of a woman surrounded by nuns during an anti-abortion demonstration in Rome, Italy
Annalisa Camilli

COSENZA — At the Annunziata Civil Hospital in this southern Italian city, every single gynecologist is a conscientious objector. So pregnancy termination is possible only twice a week here when the visiting doctor who performs the procedure is present.

“More than six months after the resignation of the only non-objector gynecologist at Annunziata, the service is still lacking and is proceeding in fits and starts," explain the activists of the FEM.IN collective, who met with the hospital's administrative director in December and made them promise to hire two more doctors and guarantee the service in the area.

The hospital is not an isolated case in Italy. According to a Ministry of Health report from 2022, 64.6% of Italian gynecologists were conscientious objectors in 2020, a rate slightly lower than 2019, while 44.6% of anesthesiologists and 36.2% of non-medical staff object to performing pregnancy terminations.

This means that 45 years after the passage of the law that decriminalized abortion in Italy through the third month of pregnancy, the "objection" rate among physicians and health care professionals is so high that it makes the termination of pregnancy effectively impractical in many areas of the country.

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