Numerous wildfires have broken out across Siberia–an event that happens because like most of the world, they don’t rake the forest floor as a previous world leader instructs–but this year, the blazes are spreading unabated because the military firefighting crews typically deployed to fight them have been sent to Ukraine, the Washington Post reports.

The Russian Federal Forestry Agency announced that last week alone, its firefighters beat down 600 wildfires in Russia’s Far East, an area dominated by peatlands.  Most of the fires in Siberia have been started by humans:  farmers clearing land who let the fires burn out of control.  Still thousands of individual fires burn across the country, with smoke from the blazes affecting the atmosphere as far away as Seattle, where the sunrise Tuesday morning was tinged red due to the smoke from the fires.

“The data are showing that the fires are occurring in the spring fire season, but there has been a high number of fires and the daily total intensity/emissions were well above average for the early stages of the season,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

The Russian forest service will be without the aid of the Russian military, who previously would help control forest fires by ferrying firefighters to remote locations, provide additional manpower when needed, and use aircraft to deliver water and supplies to the field in the famously sparsely-populated Siberia.

Now, however, with upwards of 200,000 troops either fighting in Ukraine or supporting the troops there, no pilots or aircraft can be spared, a worrying prospect for a nation where much of the forestlands have been under drought conditions for years.