This is a disaster for Russia, but its also a global disaster due to the resulting pollution and deforestation.MOSCOW — Russia scrambled its military transport planes and helicopters across the country on Thursday to fight wildfires that have engulfed more than 7 million acres in Siberia and beyond.
President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the mobilization after a dense shroud of smoke covered industrial cities in eastern Russia, prompting complaints from residents. Greenpeace labeled the blazes over 11,800 square miles an “ecological catastrophe.”
Environmental activists in Russia have called this year’s wildfires, which have consumed an area the size of Belgium, the worst in the history of observations. The situation has been exacerbated by the sheer distances involved, and many blazes are raging in remote Arctic areas that are difficult to reach.
The Russian agency for aerial forest protection, Avialesokhrana, acknowledged on Thursday that it was letting most of the fires burn themselves out. It said in a statement that about 2,850 firefighters and 21 airplanes were working to extinguish the blazes across an area of nearly 450 square miles, less than 4 percent of the total territory currently in flames.
The agency said that the remaining fires “do not threaten human settlements or economic facilities.”
“The projected costs of putting them out exceed the damage that can be inflicted by them,” the agency said.
The agency said in another statement that it was working on seeding clouds to induce rainfall in the area of wildfires. Siberian shamans said they would join in trying to summon rain, Interfax, a Russian news agency, reported on Thursday.
No injuries or evacuations have been reported so far from the fires.
Late Wednesday, President Trump called Mr. Putin to offer American help in battling the infernos. Mr. Putin said that he would accept the offer if it became necessary, but that Russian agencies are now working hard to handle the crisis. Mr. Putin was criticized last week after he offered Greece help in fighting wildfires.
But the Kremlin interpreted Mr. Trump’s call as a positive gesture that could improve the embittered relations between the two countries.
“The president of Russia regards the U.S. president’s offer as a sign that it is possible that full-scale bilateral relations will be restored in the future,” the Kremlin said in a statement. It added that the two leaders had agreed to stay in contact, both over the phone and in face-to-face meetings.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump have been working to mend ties between their countries, which turned sour after Moscow intervened in conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.
The Russian regions of Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Yakutia are currently among the worst affected by the disaster. The authorities declared a state of emergency in all of Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk — an area the size of Western Europe, stretching from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean. Emergencies were also declared in parts of Yakutia and another region, Buryatia.
Images published by NASA showed the smoke reaching the United States and Canada.
The head of the Russian weather forecasting agency, Rosgidromet, told Interfax that global warming would make wildfires worse.
“The situation will get worse every year because we can see how climate changes everywhere, even in Russia,” said the agency’s chief, Maksim Yakovenko.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev visited the city of Krasnoyarsk and gave a grim assessment of the situation.
“The prognosis at this moment is not happy,” he said. “There is no direct danger to the people, but this is not the reason to believe that everything will just go away by itself.”
Many locals in Krasnoyarsk had expressed anger after the local governor, Aleksandr V. Uss, said that it was “pointless and may even be harmful” to fight forest fires.
“If it gets cold here in wintertime and there is a blizzard, no one comes up with an idea that we should make the icebergs melt so it would get warmer,” Mr. Uss said on Sunday.
The fires even figured in a demonstration thousands of miles away, in front of Moscow City Hall. A small group gathered there on Wednesday to protest the police crackdown against a much larger rally on Saturday.
One protester carried a poster that read, “Beating up peaceful citizens is economically viable, while putting out fires in the Siberian taiga is not.”
Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace Russia’s fire department, said that Russian forest protection agencies receive about 10 percent of the funding they require.
“This is not huge money, especially when compared with the damages that we suffer,” Mr. Kuksin said in an interview that was published online.
Considerable blame obviously goes to the Russian government for its disregard for environmental concerns here, but given the environmental implications, this is one of the few situations where I will sincerely wish the Russian military all possible success in their endeavors.
