21 January 2026

While Kyiv residents have been forced to live without heat, electricity, and water for weeks due to Russian shelling, Russian citizens across the country are being deprived of the comforts of civilization due to ever-increasing utility outages caused by the critical deterioration of their infrastructure. For example, in  Omsk, on the night of January 21, a week after the previous outage, a heating main in the Leninsky district burst. As a result, 67 apartment buildings, six social institutions, and 23 administrative buildings were left without heat. City services reported the completion of repairs and the beginning of a “gradual restoration” of heat only that evening.

Additionally, some students at Omsk School No. 48 have been switched to distance learning due to a power outage caused by an accident. Nighttime temperatures in the city are dropping to -30 degrees Celsius. Residents of villages near Krasnoyarsk, where temperatures are also -30 degrees Celsius, have been without heat and power for the fourth day due to power outages. A resident of the village of Solontsy told local television that most homes are heated by electric boilers, and without power, which is cut off for many hours every day, people “cannot warm their homes.” Power engineers are citing a “technical malfunction on one of the high-voltage lines due to the maximum permissible power consumption being exceeded.”

In the Chelyabinsk region, nearly 4,000 residents of Karabash, a city with a population of just over 10,000, lost heat and hot water. The cause was a pipeline rupture on Metallurgov Street after repairs, during which the heat was also lost. The outage affected 31 apartment buildings, a school, a kindergarten, and social facilities. The city administration promised to restore heating by 9:00 PM local time. Overnight temperatures in Karabash dropped to -24°C (-24°F).

Last night, another power outage occurred in the city of Zheleznogorsk in the Kursk region. 149 homes and 18 social facilities were left without heat. Despite assurances from Kursk Governor Alexander Khinshtein that repairs would be completed Wednesday morning and that heat would be restored soon, residents continued to complain about the lack of power. There was no heat during the day in the 11th microdistrict, as well as on Lenin and Druzhby Streets. “That’s not true. None of the work has been completed. There is no heating or hot water. Dispatchers say repairs are ongoing. And this is the 21st century,” complained a local resident.

Additionally, parents of school and university students in the Kursk and Belgorod regions are complaining en masse about the lack of heat, NeMoskva reports . Specifically, this applies to Schools No. 19 and No. 39, Gymnasiums No. 12 and No. 22 in Belgorod, the Belgorod State Institute of Arts and Culture ( BSIIK ), as well as at least eight schools in Kursk and Southwestern State University.

“The children are attending school in fur coats and hats. As a result, many are getting sick. I’d like to hear from the school administration—do they think this is normal? And when will they fix the situation?” wrote a parent of one of the students in the comments section of Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov’s social media page.

https://ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/01/21/tisyachi-rossiyan-po-vsei-strane-ostalis-bez-otopleniya-i-elektrichestva-iz-za-kommunalnih-avarii-a185104