Is there a connection between the political regime in a country and the number of catastrophes and natural disasters that befall it? This might sound like the basis of a science fiction novel, but statistics in Russia show that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. There have been more natural and man-made catastrophes in Russia under President Vladimir Putin than at any time since the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1987. These include the sinking of the Kursk submarine, the accident at the Sayano-Shushensky dam in 2009, peat and forest fires in the summer of 2010 and, most recently, the flooding in the Krasnodar region.
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