For months Russian strikes have been systematically smashing Ukraine’s energy sector, hitting power plants and electricity relay stations, and plunging the country into darkness during the frigid winter.
Starting Friday, one Russian city on the border, Belgorod, got a taste of what the Ukrainians have been going through when it was hit by widespread outages after Kyiv’s forces launched its own strike against the city’s infrastructure.
Ukraine hit the plants producing power and hot water for Belgorod, leaving 600,000 people without power and 200,000 without water — a situation common across the border in Ukraine just 25 miles away.
In the days that followed, as authorities struggled to come to grips with the crisis, the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, found plenty of people to blame apart from Ukraine: internal enemies for stirring up tensions, local residents for failing to buy generators, municipalities for poor coordination and supermarket chains for failing to ensure backup power.
Residents flooded the governor’s page on VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, with pleas for electricity and angry retorts to his comments. “Maybe it’s time to stop mocking people in the region. Where should we send our children, where should we go during a total blackout?” wrote one, named Yana Drozd. “We have been living in daily fear for four years, going to bed not knowing whether we will wake up or not … people get nothing, no help.”
The governor described Ukraine’s attack as “barbaric” Saturday, although Russia has routinely targeted Ukrainian energy facilities for years and has ramped up such attacks in recent months, especially in the capital, Kyiv. Residents there have been subject to rolling blackouts of electricity, heat and water as authorities struggle to repair shattered infrastructure.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin routinely portrays Ukraine as on the brink of military collapse and Moscow driving toward inevitable victory, Russia’s economic problems have intensified, and its territorial gains this past year have been meager, despite massive losses of military personnel and equipment. Yet most Russians are either misinformed by state propaganda, prefer to ignore the war or fear speaking out in a society where any dissent is harshly punished.
The broader region of Belgorod is one of the few parts of Russia where residents feel the presence of the war, which is merely distant background noise for most in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
In Belgorod near-daily drone attacks have become part of life, and resentment has grown in the region about the apathy of Russians in other parts of the country to their fate.
By Monday, power was partially restored in Belgorod, and some residents told The Washington Post that they had services.
“There are no mass outages yet, though there are some in certain districts and on some streets,” said Ilya, who spoke on the condition his last name not be used to speak to the foreign media. He said that many commercial operations, such as shopping malls, have been shut down to save electricity for residential areas. “At the moment, the situation is more or less under control, but if there are further strikes on the energy infrastructure, I fear that Belgorod will be plunged into darkness and extremely serious and difficult times will begin.”
Gladkov has still described the situation on Monday as “practically catastrophic” and admitted for the first time that it would not be possible to fully restore the system.
The temperature, meanwhile, has plummeted to just 12 degrees Fahrenheit, (-11 Celsius) and Tuesday the governor warned that the situation could deteriorate and cause further power outages across the region. He called on residents to prepare to leave at short notice in case of an emergency situation in which power and heating were totally lost.
Gladkov said residents should relocate children to relatives in parts of Russia with power and heating if they could. “We understand that it is impossible to fully restore electricity supply to residential buildings — first and foremost apartment blocks — and to industrial enterprises solely through backup generation,” he said in a video address on Telegram.
Local resident Alyonka Budarova, however, said on the governor’s VKontakte page: “I have two children, one of whom is very young. I can’t leave them without heat, and I have nowhere to go. It’s difficult to travel with a small child. What should I do?”
Gladkov also issued a warning that internal “enemies” were trying to destabilize the region, in what appeared to be a warning against criticism and dissent. He ordered officials to conduct anti-corruption operations.
“We need to prepare a monitoring report confirming this, looking for attempts to provoke the population with the aim of destabilizing the situation, which is already extremely difficult,” he said. “This concerns attempts to incite and provoke social tension.”
He also blamed local businesses, including supermarkets and retail chains, for not ensuring they had backup power.
In Ukraine, which every winter during the war has sustained such devastating attack on its power sector, most businesses have invested in generators to keep the lights on after attacks.
The attacks also knocked out 60 percent of the mobile phone network in Belgorod, making it difficult for residents to report power outages to regional authorities.
One leading Russian military blogger, Yegor Kholmogorov, with the handle Zapiski Veterana, or Notes of a Veteran, wrote that Belgorod is under “sustained systemic pressure,” turning the region into a war zone, and he criticized the authorities’ limited support for the area. Local authorities, he said, were unprepared for last week’s attacks.
“Belgorod has been left to regularly absorb retaliatory strikes for attacks on military and infrastructure targets deep inside Ukraine. The authorities need to take this into account, and those who bear the greatest burden of this war should be granted adequate benefits and relief,” he wrote.
He questioned why after years of intermittent attacks, the authorities weren’t prepared for a crisis of this scale.
Gladkov admitted Saturday that regional authorities had failed to get a clear picture of which areas were worst hit because of poor coordination, blaming municipal leaders for the failures.
“We saw that the insufficient response to information from municipalities is leading to a distorted understanding of the overall situation, thereby reducing the effectiveness of government actions. This must be corrected,” he said.
He also said that temporary accommodation points and options to recharge phones had not been placed in facilities where people are, such as apartment entrances, shops and social centers.
“This hasn’t been the case, but it definitely should be,” Gladkov said, promising to post information on where people could access such services.
In a Tuesday post on Gladkov’s page, Tatyana Manyakhina said her family was still without heat.
“Good morning. I can’t keep quiet any longer. … There is no heat after the attack. We are freezing. The children are sick. To be more precise, there is heat, but not in all rooms. Calls to the utility company are useless,” she wrote.
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