Following the Fifa 14 Coins PS3 July heatwave in the country, peat fires -- which can smoulder for years underground -- ignited forest fires in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the Voronezh Oblast, and across central and western Russia. A few days later, an area of 500,000 hectares was ablaze, with Moscow shrouded in a dense, thick smoke.
Since then, the area of the fires has been brought under control, with now only about 200,000 hectares ablaze, but there are much bigger problems looming. The fires have approached the Red Forest, an area that suffered the worst of Chernobyl's fallout in 1986, with the soil still heavily contaminated by cesium-137 and strontium-90.