Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered police to investigate if bushfires currently burning across more than 3 million hectares in Siberia were started deliberately to conceal illegal logging activity. Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case over the fires and was investigating officials in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk for suspected negligence in not taking action to stop them. The bushfires cover 3.1 million hectares of mostly remote, uninhabited forest, the Federal Forestry Agency said on Thursday. …NASA said in a statement on Wednesday its satellite imagery showed the smoke from the fires, which collectively cover an area the size of Belgium, had wafted across Russia’s Siberia and Far East all the way to Alaska and down the west coast of Canada.