Burst pipes and freezing flats plague Putin’s Russia

A man carrying a child over a river of boiling water from a burst pipe has become an unlikely hero in Russia, highlighting the country’s dangerous infrastructure failures at a time when Vladimir Putin is choreographing his re-election as president.

The man, Rza Rzaev, became a local celebrity in Novosibirsk in early January when pictures circulated on social media of him dressed in a dark coat, a grey hoodie and a hat meandering through dense clouds of steam with a flashlight and a child in his arms. He had hand-built an improvised bridge and carried people across the stream of hot water from a ruptured heating pipe that had flooded several streets of the Siberian city. More than a dozen people suffered burns and two were hospitalised.

A few days later, Rzaev received a transfer of Rbs70,000 ($770), more than the monthly average salary in the region, that locals raised on social media to thank him.

The Novosibirsk incident, along with other failures in communal heating leaving thousands of people in freezing flats in the dead of winter have shone a light on the urgent need of investment in the Soviet-era infrastructure as Putin’s war in Ukraine consumes a growing share of the Russian budget.

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Russia’s poorly maintained public utilities also contrast with the image the Kremlin seeks to project as an energy superpower that has weaponised oil and gas exports and targeted Ukrainian heating and electricity networks since its full-scale invasion in 2022.

“I saw a group of kids being doused with boiling water from both sides . . . I am a father myself, and I couldn’t just leave them,” said Rza, who moved to Russia from Uzbekistan 13 years ago and still dreams of becoming a citizen.

Now in his late 40s, Rzaev works as a warehouse loader and carried about 20 people that day, stepping from the -30°C cold into boiling water and getting soaked in the process. When he returned to his apartment, he was unable to warm up, as there was no heating.

Other similar incidents this year have led authorities to introduce a state of emergency in several regions. 

The most high-profile one occurred in Klimovsk, in the Moscow suburbs, where 170 buildings could not be heated for a week during temperatures that went as low as -20°C, affecting about 40,000 residents.

The week-long freeze for residents living just 50km away from the Kremlin prompted a rare intervention from Putin, who pledged to take the situation “under personal control”, ordering the nationalisation of the boiler house that caused it.

“The elections are not far off and the president needs to publicly demonstrate that he is a good tsar trying to bring order,” said Aleksandr Kynev, an independent political analyst. 

The widespread communal failures have provided rare ammunition for public criticism of authorities in wartime Russia where dissent can lead to jail time.

“Cities are freezing. Who is guilty?” Boris Nadezhdin, a long-shot opposition presidential candidate, wrote on social media app Telegram. “The huge amounts of money that have been spent and planned for the special military operation could have been invested in improving the quality of life of my fellow citizens.” 

Since announcing his run for president in December, Putin has taken steps to appear mindful of ordinary Russians’ concerns and act as if life is proceeding as normal despite the war. He has made appearances in far-flung places such as a greenhouse in the Chukotka, in the Arctic far east, and taken a reindeer ride in the tundra.

“Just a brilliant cucumber! Look, this is such a good, firm cucumber,” an employee told Putin, who touched the greenhouse’s vegetables approvingly.

Meanwhile, Russians continue to suffer from decaying Soviet-era infrastructure, which is poorly maintained and funded.

According to official estimates, between 45 per cent and 60 per cent of all utility networks need repair, with the figure increasing every year, as well as the number of accidents. In Chukotka, which Putin visited for the first time in his 23 years of rule, the figure reaches about 90 per cent.

“There is no data for the beginning of 2024 yet, but most likely we will see that there were more accidents than in 2023, both in number and seriousness,” said Ilya Dolmatov, an economist with Russia’s Higher School of Economics. He said the spike was likely caused by a confluence of “wear and tear” and a sudden drop in temperature.

Putin’s self-declared concern with the state of Russia’s infrastructure is not new: in his 2012 presidential campaign he pledged to “bring order to housing and communal services”.

One of the solutions many had high hopes for, allowing businesses to operate parts of utilities networks, has hardly improved things. And despite Putin’s pledge to keep the cost of bills low, many Russian families are struggling to pay. Russian household debts for public utilities have ballooned in recent years, nearing Rbs1tn ($11.2bn) in 2023. 

About two-thirds of communal heating, electricity, gas, water and sewage services are funded by payments from households and businesses, and are administered by Rossiya, a bank controlled by Putin’s close friend Yuri Kovalchuk. The rest is covered by the state, with a higher proportion of the funding coming from regional budgets, often in deficit themselves. 

According to Russia’s ministry of construction, more than Rbs9tn (or $100bn) is needed to modernise communal networks by 2030, the equivalent of about a quarter of all budget spending planned for the current year. But while defence spending has gone up in the past decade, reaching more than a third of the overall budget last year, funding for public utilities has only slowly increased over the same period to 2.2 per cent of the total expenditure in 2023 — far below the investment needed.

Heating issues are just the tip of the iceberg. Though Russia is the world’s top gas exporter, only 11 of its 83 administrative regions are fully connected to the gas pipeline network.

Sewage system ruptures are another common issue. One of the most notable incidents occurred in 2022 in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where streets were flooded with human faeces.

“If we look at what the least popular governors were criticised for, it’s all about public services — icicles, snow not cleared, garbage not removed, cold flats, burst pipes,” said Kynev, the independent analyst.

Putin and his government, however, have so far succeeded in deflecting the blame, said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center in Moscow, an independent polling group.

“People are dissatisfied with the state of communal services, but they perceive the situation as a chronic disease. When something breaks, it annoys them, but it does not come as a surprise.”