The regions of Russia are hiding the scale of Ukrainian attacks.
Points of attention
- Russian regional authorities are hiding the scale of Ukrainian attacks to preserve a facade of stability and political survival.
- Refusal to activate sirens during missile or drone threats reveals the frequency and severity of attacks impacting Russian territories.
Russia is hiding the scale of Ukrainian attacks on its regions
This was reported by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.
Russia's regional authorities are overwhelmingly refusing to sound sirens when there are reports of missile or drone threats. The wording varies from region to region, but the gist is the same: attacks have become so frequent that reporting them honestly would shatter the image of calm that the Kremlin is trying to maintain at all costs.
In temporarily occupied Crimea, the so-called "administration" decided not to respond to every drone flight. Crimean functionary Oleg Kryuchkov explained this frankly: if the signal sounded every time, the alarm would not go off for 22 hours a day.
In Rostov, the refusal to use sirens was justified by the practice of the so-called “LPR” and “DPR”, where people allegedly run out into the street during alerts, which supposedly doubles the risk of casualties.
In Yaroslavl, they said directly that they would not turn on the sirens to avoid panic.
In Krasnodar, they took a different path and separated the signals: “drone danger” there is not officially equated with civil defense signals, unlike air raids.
In the Ryazan region, the explanation sounds even more cynical: frequent sirens will simply cease to be perceived as an emergency signal, so it is better not to touch them at all, the SZRU noted.
In Kotelniki, a suburb of Moscow, the authorities have refused to even reveal the addresses of the shelters to residents. According to officials, this information will only be made available to people “during the period of mobilization and in wartime” — a phrase that in itself reveals how far the Kremlin is pushing back the moment of honesty with its own population.
Residents of Moscow and the Moscow region are massively complaining about the lack of any air raid warnings and sirens. The official explanation from the authorities sounds almost like a quote from a propaganda textbook: a mass warning in an unobvious situation is supposedly capable of causing more harm than the threat itself, because it provokes panic and chaos.
The most eloquent comment was made by the head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabyrov. He explained the abandonment of daily sirens by the increase in the consumption of antidepressants in Russia, effectively admitting what the Kremlin has been trying to deny for years: constant attacks are destroying the psychological state of the population, and the authorities are afraid not of drones, but of people's reaction to the truth about them.
In essence, all these explanations boil down to one thing: the scale of the strikes on Russian territory is now so great that silencing the sirens is no longer a matter of logistics. It is now a matter of political survival for a regime that has spent years building an image of a war that seems to have no impact on ordinary Russians.
