Donald Trump has offered Vladimir Putin help in putting out the vast wildfires that are raging in Siberia.
The US President’s gesture is being seen as a sign that battered ties between the two countries can be repaired, the Kremlin said.
It said the two leaders had spoken by phone at Washington’s initiative, hours after Putin ordered the Russian army to help firefighters battle the wildfires.
The fires have spread to around 3 million hectares of mostly remote forest, an area almost the size of Belgium, according to the Federal Forestry Agency, wafting smoke across Siberia and prompting several regions to declare states of emergency.
Environmentalists have dubbed the fires an ecological catastrophe and a petition circulated online by an ecologist from the Siberian city of Tomsk had garnered 824,000 signatures as of Wednesday demanding authorities take tougher action.
The defence ministry was sending 10 Ilyushin-76 planes and 10 transport helicopters to the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk equipped with firefighting equipment following the order from the Kremlin, RIA news agency reported.
Firefighters were working to put out forest fires covering 107,000 hectares in Siberia’s Irkutsk and other regions, but other vast blazes raging on 2.9 million hectares are only being monitored, the Federal Forestry Agency said on Wednesday.
Regional authorities have said they do not plan to expend resources on fighting the latter as they are mainly in remote, uninhabited areas and therefore not a direct threat to people.
An activist at Greenpeace in Russia told Echo of Moscow radio station that involving the military in the firefighting effort was not likely to yield a breakthrough and that the move had also come “fairly late.”
“As a rule, bringing in the help of army units is ineffective because soldiers don’t know how to put out fires,” Grigory Kuksin, the Greenpeace activist, was quoted as saying.
“It would have been better to put out these fires in the early stages when it was still possible.”
Putin told Trump that Moscow would take him up on his offer if necessary, the Kremlin said, adding: “The Russian president took this step from the US president as a sign that in the future we can restore full-scale ties between our two countries.”
Russia has long been keen to try to start rebuilding battered US - Russia relations, which remain strained by everything from Syria to Ukraine and allegations of Russian interference in US politics, which Moscow denies.
The two leaders agreed to continue their contacts over the phone and in face-to-face meetings, the Kremlin said.
The White House confirmed the two men had spoken by phone and said they had discussed the wildfires as well as trade between their two nations.