Residents of Yuldus, a Tatar village in western Siberia destroyed by ongoing forest fires, have called on the head of Russia’s republic of Tatarstan to invest 500 million rubles ($6.5 million) into the area’s reconstruction. “The republic won’t lose much [by allocating] half a million, but…we will know that Tatarstan hasn’t forgotten about us,” local resident Ruzan Khafizov said in a video appeal to Tatarstan’s leader Rustam Minnikhanov published Thursday. “Thank you very much in advance, dear president,” Khafizov added, referring to Minnikhanov by the title that he was stripped of last year.