Mass forest and wildfires raging in Russia’s Arctic region have generated huge amounts of smoke in recent weeks. Most of the fires are burning in north-east Russia, where vast swathes of forest and steppe were destroyed in the summer of 2021, the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) said on Thursday. Emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane from the fires reached the third-highest level for the Arctic in June in the past two decades. Emission levels were only higher in the Arctic Circle during the devastating forest fires in 2019 and 2020. CAMS pointed …