KLIMOVSK, Russia (Reuters) – Investigators said on Tuesday they had arrested three people over heating outages south of Moscow that have sent regional officials scrambling to restore services and drawn scrutiny from the Kremlin.
Authorities blamed the breakdown on failures at a boiler plant owned by a private ammunition factory. The heads of the heating plant and the factory were arrested on suspicion of providing unsafe services, investigators said in a statement.
The deputy head of the local administration in Podolsk, a city south of Moscow, was also detained on suspicion of certifying the heating plant as adequate for winter despite allegedly knowing about defects that needed to be fixed.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had discussed the situation late on Monday with Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov and other officials, and “titanic” efforts were being made to resolve the situation.
Vorobyov posted a stream of updates on social media and said the boiler plant in question was being taken over by local authorities and would be modernised and restaffed.
It was not immediately clear if the Klimovsk Specialised Cartridge Plant, the factory that owned the heating plant, was being nationalised. State arms corporation Rostec said it was ready to take control if such a decision was made.
Moscow and the surrounding region have suffered an unusually harsh winter. The temperature in Klimovsk, south of Podolsk, was -8 Celsius on Tuesday, mild by the standard of recent weeks.
The heating failure is awkward for the authorities at a time when Putin is embarking on a campaign for a March presidential election and voters are looking for assurances that the state can maintain decent living standards and public services despite the costs of the war in Ukraine.
Putin’s victory is not in doubt, but supporters of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny say the campaign offers a chance for them to connect with voters and highlight problems in the country that they blame on his 24-year rule.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Gareth Jones)
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