Aleksandar Vulin, former Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia and chairman of the Serbian Movement of Socialists, stated that the European Union only paid attention to the forest fires in the republic after a special Il-76 aircraft of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations arrived there on a humanitarian mission.
“The fire in the Deliblato Sands started on 5 August. The European Union did not notice it until a Russian firefighting Ilyushin appeared over the fire site on 20 August. On 22 August the EU remembered that the Deliblato Sands were burning and that they had several helicopters they could send us to help. If the Russians had not come, would the EU have noticed that Serbia was burning?” — according to the politician’s statement distributed by his press service.
Serbia faced a difficult situation due to natural fires, which is why the local authorities turned to Moscow for help. The Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center operates in the city of Niš. It was there that the special flight of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations arrived on 19 August, and the next day the Russian crew began extinguishing the fire.
As the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs reported on 21 August, four firefighting helicopters from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania are also being sent to the country within the framework of the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
