Beyond the Urals

How the authorities in Chelyabinsk are floundering as the war in Ukraine draws ever closer

As Russia continues its relentless campaign of airstrikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, Kyiv is applying more and more pressure of its own to bring Moscow’s war of aggression home to the Russian people.

Ukrainian missile strikes left over half a million civilians in Russia’s southwestern Belgorod region without electricity in early January, while a second large-scale blackout affected the western Oryol region. Even the authorities in the Orenburg region, deep in the Russian hinterland, warned of a potential drone strike on 6 January, while the Yaroslavl and Volgograd regions, both of which are far from the front line, were also droned in the first days of the year.

Since last year, attacks that previously only affected Russian regions bordering Ukraine began to be felt far further afield, including one incident in the suburbs of the Urals city of Chelyabinsk in which 23 people died in circumstances that are still far from clear. Novaya Gazeta Europe spoke to people from the Chelyabinsk region about life during wartime.

Information blackout

Official warnings about incoming Ukrainian drones became a part of daily life for people in the Urals last year. Chelyabinsk region residents receive warnings both from the regional Emergency Situations Ministry and from the neighbouring regions of Kurgan, Sverdlovsk, Orenburg and Bashkortostan.

On 22 October, an explosion at the Plastmass military plant in Kopeysk, on the outskirts of the regional capital Chelyabinsk, killed 23 workers and injured at least another 29. A criminal case opened by Russia’s Investigative Committee into the plant’s management found that it had failed to observe industrial safety procedures.

While popular Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported at the time that the explosion had been the result of a Ukrainian drone strike, many other commentators analysing social media videos of the strike said that they couldn’t explain the cause of the explosion, and Chelyabinsk Governor Alexey Teksler has since said that the drone strike theory has never been confirmed.

Locals still only have a vague understanding of what to do when there is a threat of a drone attack, urban planner Mikhail Popov told Novaya Gazeta Europe. “People in the Chelyabinsk region have been receiving SMS notifications about possible attacks for over two months, but they have no information about shelters, and many people don’t know where to go in case of danger.”

In addition, emergency SMS delivery is chaotic, with many residents taking to online forums to complain about not receiving SMS attack warnings at all, something that’s not helped by internet service interruptions.

“Internet provision in the region is poor,” says Boris Zolotarevsky, the man behind independent Telegram channel Chelyabinsk of the Future. “It gets switched off and jammed at random, with no explanation,” he explains. “Areas close to manufacturing sites are jammed more often, and people don’t understand why. In Chelyabinsk, the internet is regularly cut in areas near defence companies and the Shagol airfield.”

In recent weeks, a mobile app created by the regional Emergency Situations Ministry to facilitate sending out air-raid alerts has been advertised in the Chelyabinsk media. The app, according to the ministry, teaches people about “the risks and threats” of drone strikes and “helps boost safety and sense of security”.

However, the app “barely features in the world of Chelyabinsk residents”, Zolotarevsky says. “Only 17,000 people downloaded it, a negligible figure for the region. Even on 15 October, when there was a drone alert in the city, the SMS came through either with a long delay or not at all.”

Going underground

Though information about emergency shelters can now be found on the official Chelyabinsk website, locals barely use it.

“Some shelters aren’t shown on maps at all, and even some that are aren’t fit for purpose,” says Zolotarevsky, adding that many are in private properties, and that a lack of communication between those responsible for maintaining the shelters and the authorities only adds to the problem.

“Officially, there are 324 shelters in Kopeysk, but residents have many questions about the state they’re in. One woman from Kopeysk wrote on social media that she’d discovered her own building had a shelter, but she didn’t know how to reach it and hadn’t seen a single sign,” Zolotarevsky says.

One Chelyabinsk resident who asked to be referred to simply as Galina told Novaya that the closest shelter to her house she was aware of was an underground car park, but says that she doesn’t always get SMS notifications about incoming drones in time, and is forced to look for information online instead.

“Once, when my daughter and I were in the same room, she received an alert and I didn’t,” another woman wrote on a public forum, adding that they used the same mobile provider.

Security problems have come as a surprise to people in a region who have historically felt that their location beyond the Urals protected them from major global disasters. This was, after all, the area to which strategically important businesses were evacuated during World War II. Now, however, the situation in the region is radically different.

Unreliable internet connections, constant drone warnings, poor communication with the authorities and a lack of clear emergency protocols in case of real danger all combine to leave locals frustrated, residents told Novaya Gazeta Europe. The situation is further exacerbated by the growing popular mistrust in the regional authorities. “The explosion at the Plastmass factory showed that in an emergency, people do not have a clear understanding of where to get information and what to do,” says Zolotarevsky.

Experts say they believe that Ukrainian drone strikes in the region will only worsen if the war continues. “Drone ranges have increased, and while strikes beyond the Urals are still rare, they’re becoming increasingly frequent in areas such as Bashkortostan,” Russian military analyst Kirill Mikhailov told Novaya Gazeta Europe, adding ominously that Ukraine’s brand new Flamingo cruise missile had “a range of 3,000km”.