Anti-Ukrainian textbooks published by an educational company with ties to Vladimir Putin went up in flames early Tuesday, as a warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow became the latest site destroyed amid a spate of mysterious fires in the country.
Video released by Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry shows the warehouse for the publisher Prosveshcheniye (“Enlightenment” in English) fully engulfed in flames.
More than 100 firefighters were required to get the 8-acre blaze under control, and even then, it took them four and a half hours, according to local media reports.
“By the time firefighters arrived, the whole area was on fire,” a witness was quoted telling Russia’s TASS news agency.
Citing a source in the emergency ministry, TASS said the fire started precisely in an area housing textbooks and other printed materials. The scorched premises were being rented out by Prosveshcheniye and another company called “Stock Trading” that stored appliances on the premises, according to REN TV.
В Подмосковье крупный пожар на складе издательства “Просвещение”. Площадь возгорания составила почти 33 тыс. квадратных метров.
Как сообщают МЧС, пламя охватило территорию производственно-складского комплекса “Атлант Парк” в Богородском. Часть помещения обрушилась. pic.twitter.com/ScxjMSSE82
— ФедералПресс (@FederalPress) May 3, 2022
The publishing company, whose board is reportedly chaired by Putin pal and former judo partner Arkady Rotenberg, made headlines recently for a decision to start erasing Ukraine from textbooks for schoolchildren immediately after Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.
“We have a task before us, to make it as if there simply is no such thing as Ukraine,” one employee of the publishing company told independent news outlet MediaZona of the campaign.
The cause of the inferno at the warehouse was not immediately known, but it came on the heels of a string of fires on Russian territory close to the border with Ukraine.
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Explosions were reported in the Russian city of Belgorod just hours before the warehouse fire, while a day earlier, a railway bridge was destroyed in the Kursk region. Fires also broke out at oil storage depots in Bryansk, where Russian troops in Ukraine were thought to be getting their supplies from.
In April, Russian authorities said 17 people were killed in a fire at a Russian military research institute northwest of Moscow.
Authorities said preliminary information suggested faulty wiring may have been to blame in that incident.
Russia has pinned the blame on Ukraine for many of the other blazes, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied that Ukrainian forces were behind them.
His adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, called it karma, describing it as an “absolutely natural process.”
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