russia’s Regions Downplaying the Scale of Attacks on Their Territory

Regional authorities in russia are widely refusing to sound sirens when missile or drone threats are reported. The wording varies from region to region, but the essence is the same: the attacks have become so frequent that honestly reporting them would shatter the image of calm that the kremlin is trying to maintain at all costs.

In the temporarily occupied Crimea, the local “administration” has decided not to respond to every drone flyover. Crimean official oleg kryuchkov explained this candidly: if the sirens sounded every time, the alarm would not subside for 22 hours a day.

In rostov, the decision not to sound the sirens was justified by citing the practices of the “lpr” and “dpr,” where people allegedly run out into the streets during alerts, which supposedly doubles the risk of casualties.

In yaroslavl, officials stated outright that they do not activate the sirens to avoid panic. In krasnodar, they took a different approach and distinguished between the signals: there, “drone danger” is not officially equated with civil defense alerts, unlike air raid alarms. In ryazan region, the explanation sounds even more cynical: frequent sirens will simply cease to be perceived as an emergency signal, so it’s better not to use them at all.

In kotelniki, near moscow, local authorities went even further and refused to even disclose the locations of shelters and bomb shelters to residents. According to officials, this information will be shared with the public only “during mobilization and in wartime” – a phrasing that in itself reveals just how far the kremlin is pushing back the moment of honesty with its own population.

Meanwhile, residents of the city of moscow and moscow region are complaining en masse that there are no alerts or air raid sirens. The authorities’ official explanation sounds almost like a quote from a propaganda textbook: mass alerts in an unclear situation are supposedly capable of causing more harm than the threat itself, as they provoke panic and chaos.

The most telling comment came from head of bashkortostan radiy khabirov. He attributed the decision to stop the daily sirens to a rise in antidepressant use in russia, effectively admitting what the kremlin has been trying to deny for years: constant attacks are devastating the population’s psychological well-being, and the authorities are not afraid of drones, but of people’s reactions to the truth about them.

In fact, all these explanations boil down to one common factor: the scale of the strikes on russia’s territory has become so great that the silence of the sirens is no longer a matter of logistics. Now it is a matter of the political survival of the regime which for years has been building an image of a war that supposedly does not affect ordinary russians.