People gather around a mobile kitchen after dozens of residential buildings were left without central heating due to an accident in housing and communal services caused by cold weather in the town of Klimovsk near Moscow . Photo: Reuters/EVGENIYA NOVOZHENINA
Thousands of Russians live without heating during a freezing winter that is destroying the country's fragile Soviet-era infrastructure.
Hot water pipes burst, power cuts across Russia and radiators freeze, causing is drawing complaints from angry locals who have accused officials of incompetence two months before the presidential election.
Videos released this week from Nizhny Novgorod, 265 miles east of Moscow, show Residents are evacuating from apartments flooded with steaming boiling water.
“The apartment is completely destroyed. The apartment is unfit for living,” said one of the men, filming water pouring through the ceiling.
After dozens of residential buildings in Klimovsk near Moscow were left without central heating, a mobile kitchen appeared with food for residents who were left cold and unable to cook, a wood stove was installed.
In Novosibirsk, Siberia, a large pipe burst on Wednesday, sending a jet of boiling water high into the air, burning 13 people and leaving entire apartment buildings without heating during one of Russia's coldest winters in decades.
< p>A resident of Novosibirsk said that she was upset, but not surprised.
“Of course, people are upset. They have been in the cold with their children since January 11,” she said, declining to give her name. “I wasn’t surprised at all. At some point this could have happened because the burst pipes were laid back in 1973 and 1963.”
Municipal officials acknowledged that the burst pipe in Novosibirsk was laid in 1963 and last repaired in 1990. a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In Khimki, a suburb of Moscow, freezing residents began to crowd around a fire in the street to warm up at a temperature of -25°C.
“We didn’t have heating from January 2. The authorities are aware of the problem,” the woman said in the video, which showed several people holding SOS signs. “Please help us, we are desperate.”
A municipal worker removes snow during snowfall and cold weather in Moscow. Photo: YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA
Campaigners say chronic underfunding has undermined civil infrastructure in Russia.
Russia's centrally controlled hot water systems were built in the Soviet Union and struggle with extreme temperature changes that turned out to be harsh this year. year.
With elections due in mid-March, analysts say the setbacks undermine the Kremlin's idea that Vladimir Putin is the tough, competent leader ordinary Russians want, although his victory is still assured.
Emergencies “heating” around Russia, the result of long-term underinvestment in public infrastructure, complicates this picture, said Ben Noble, associate professor of Russian politics at UCL.
And the discontent of the civilian population is unlikely to be smoothed out soon.
A couple stands on the Komendantskaya pier of the Peter and Paul Fortress and looks at the frozen Neva in time of abnormal frosts in St. Petersburg. : Zuma Press/Eyevine/Artem Pryakhin
Putin has put his military ahead of civilian demands, approving a massive increase in military funding and co-opting everything from shopping malls to bakeries to produce weapons for Ukraine's military.
But infrastructure destruction is not the only domestic problem Putin faces. Although protests have been effectively banned, demonstrations against the mobilization have been growing in Bashkortostan, a region with a large Muslim population south of the Ural Mountains.
People in Dagestan, in southern Russia on the Caspian Sea, have also been protesting since the summer against the collapse of infrastructure, and the wives and mothers of mobilized men are in favor of the return of their men from the fronts in Ukraine.
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