A number of countries are offering to help with efforts to quench Russia’s wildfires, including France, Germany, and Italy, and Belarus is fighting fires on its Russian border.  The death toll has now reached 50, the Kremlin’s Volga representative is calling the fire ‘a beast‘, and thick smoke over Moscow is interfering with flight schedules.  Stockpiles of explosive military material have been moved to safe locations from their base near Naro-Fominsk due to concerns about encroaching flames.  Impressive compensation figures (around $67,000 per household, part of ‘a string of populist gestures‘) for Russians who have lost their homes in the fire are inspiring criticism that ‘Putin’s government is throwing money at a problem that it helped create and did little to avert‘.  Why didn’t the Kremlin respond to criticism from the US about the detention of the Strategy 31 protesters?  Victor Davidoff, one of those arrested last month at the group’s Triumfalnaya Ploshchad rally, explains his motives.  ‘For those of us who lived in the Soviet period and remember perestroika and glasnost, it remains a mystery why the current leaders are following the path of their Soviet predecessors.‘