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Belgorod governor warns full power restoration impossible
Nearly 600,000 residents in Russia's Belgorod region endure a fourth day without electricity, heat, or water, as authorities admit complete restoration of damaged infrastructure proves impossible despite substantial federal aid. Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov delivered this stark assessment during a January 12 regional government meeting, cautioning that all 22 municipal entities spanning the area's 1.5 million people face potential total cutoffs of essential services like heating, power, water supply, and sewage systems.
Officials describe this as the region's worst blackout since large-scale war erupted in Ukraine nearly four years ago, triggered by strikes on a cogeneration plant and electrical substation overnight January 8-9. With nighttime temperatures plunging to minus 18 Celsius and daytime around minus 11, residents navigate pitch-black streets using flashlights and car headlights. Footage from Belgorod city shows darkened apartment blocks as emergency teams work under threat of further attacks to restore power.
Over 60% of mobile phone towers remain offline due to the outage, per regional Digital Development Minister Sergei Chetverikov, even as operators must keep base stations running for at least six hours post-cutoff. Malls have shuttered en masse, and more than 60 industrial firms face orders to limit electricity use to eight hours daily, from midnight to 8 a.m. "Everyone I know has been affected somehow by the power, heat, and water cuts," one Belgorod resident told The Moscow Times. "There's a sense of panic to some extent. People are scared because nothing like this has ever happened before."
Gladkov's statement that no backup systems can fully replace lost power supplies drew sharp resident criticism. He urged citizens to buy their own generators, sparking accusations that officials shift blame rather than act decisively. Municipal leaders must now identify bedridden patients and infants in buildings unsuitable for generators, aiming to relocate them to heated facilities. Generators have been deployed where possible in schools, kindergartens, and boiler rooms.
The crisis fuels dissent crackdowns, with Gladkov ordering heightened social media monitoring and warnings against "information attacks" by "internal enemies" exploiting the hardship. Belgorod's blackout coincides with massive outages hitting about one million Ukrainians in Dnipropetrovsk region from Russian strikes, underscoring the infrastructure war intensifying into the conflict's fourth winter.
