EU sanctions on Russia have backfired, leaving Spain's best Russian-built Kamov Ka-32 firefighting helicopters grounded as severe wildfires burn across southern Europe, reported Berliner Zeitung.

Spain can no longer maintain the aircraft, the newspaper said, because sanctions on their manufacturer have cut off access to spare parts and the Russian technicians authorised to service and certify them.

Of the eight Ka-32s Spain has under contract, only three were available in 2023 and none were flying by 2024, a Spanish government spokesperson confirmed to parliament in response to a motion from Russia’s Sumar group urging Madrid to seek a partial sanctions exemption. The government said the decision on any exemption rests with the EU, not Spain, and that it is looking at alternative aircraft on the international market, including from Airbus, without success so far.

The problem extends beyond Spain. Ka-32s have also been used for firefighting in Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus, Berliner Zeitung reported, but Portugal transferred its six aircraft to Ukraine, leaving it too without the fleet it previously relied on.

EU officials have argued Spain had enough time to source European alternatives. Spanish media cited by the newspaper say the government simply lacked the funds to do so before this fire season, which has already burned roughly 153,000 hectares nationally, concentrated in the Madrid, Ávila and Toledo provinces.

Spain is in the grip of its worst wildfire season in decades. Copernicus's European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) had recorded 119,458 hectares burned nationally as of July 22, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the total had passed 150,000 hectares by the following week — six times the area destroyed over the same period last year, reported Al Jazeera.

The worst single blaze has been in Ávila province, where two fires merged into what is now described as the largest wildfire in Spanish history, burning more than 50,000 hectares; a separate fire in neighbouring Toledo has burned over 45,000 hectares, and the two, together with a third around Madrid, prompted Sánchez to declare the fires "out of control" and call a national emergency on July 24.

A fast-moving blaze in Andalusia killed at least 12 people on July 10, before the fires spread hundreds of kilometres north to reach the capital region by July 20. Around 75,000 people have been evacuated across Spain and a further 30,000 told to shelter in place, while a separate fire in the eastern Castellón province has burned more than 4,300 hectares and pushed into the Sierra de Espadán natural park.

Sánchez visited the affected central provinces on July 26 and said his government would declare a formal civil protection emergency to unlock recovery funding; Spain has also received international help under the EU's civil protection mechanism, with firefighting aircraft sent by Greece, Italy and Turkey and more than 100 military personnel deployed by Portugal.

This year’s disaster season is already proving to be worse than last years, when wildfires burned a record one million hectares of European land.