Extract from ABC News
On the same day the temperature reached -21 degrees Celsius outside, Kazimir Belev's heating stopped working.
It's been patchy in the past, but this time, things are different.
It's not just his apartment or his building that's affected.
"It turned out that the problem is much bigger than in previous cases," the 31-year-old said.
"Two large districts of the city with a population of over a million people were left without heating."
Kazimir lives in Novosibirsk, in southern Russia.
But if the growing chorus of complaints on social media is anything to go by, infrastructure issues are affecting almost every corner of the country.
As temperatures plunge, Russia's aging patchwork of central heating systems is a major concern.
In some cases, entire cities rely on one Soviet-era boiler plant to stay warm.
The heating first went off in Kazimir's apartment on January 11.
While it returned sporadically in subsequent days, on Wednesday, it shut down completely.
Anecdotal evidence suggests many of the city's 1.5 million residents are affected.
In one video, floods of hot water which would usually be pumped into radiators in homes and other public buildings can be seen flowing down Novosibirsk's streets.
"The apartment is getting colder hour by hour," said Kazimir, who can't turn to other sources of heating.
"Connecting a powerful electric heater is like voluntarily starting a fire. The power grid here is quite weak.
"It already happened: the sockets were melting because someone plugged in a heater."
The issues appear widespread.
In Elektrostal, near Moscow, a video shows women huddled around a bonfire outside their apartments.
They say their radiators stopped working earlier this month.
The capital averages highs of -5C in January.
"We are using everything to keep us warm, it's still impossible to stay inside," one says, before the group breaks into a chant of: "We are freezing! We are freezing!"
In another clip, filmed in the village of Selyatino, locals described the situation as "horrible" and say they're in a "fight for survival".
A group of residents in the Khimki area appealed directly to President Vladimir Putin to fix their heating in a video circulating on messaging service Telegram.
"We are sitting at -25 degrees outside. Our entire buildings are here," one woman says, claiming residents have no hot or cold water.
"Millions of appeals, millions of complaints but it's all in vain. It seems like no one cares about our situation."
Putin's tricky timing
The rumblings come at an inconvenient time for the Russian president, who is preparing for an election in March.
While the result is considered a foregone conclusion — allegations of electoral fraud have accompanied Putin's previous victories — any insinuation the country is crumbling will be unwelcome at the Kremlin, which has diverted significant public funds to prop up its invasion of Ukraine.
In 2010, official estimates put the repair bill for Russia's housing and municipal infrastructure at $US200 billion ($203 billion at the time).
Vlad Mykhnenko, an associate professor in sustainable urban development at Oxford University, said, based on current spending levels, it would take more than 70 years for Russia to fix even the issues it has now.
He's expecting it to lead to an "avalanche of disasters".
"We are seeing more and more videos appearing. I've seen some cases in which people didn't have heating for two years," Dr Mykhnenko said.
"So there are places, and some of them are fairly big cities of 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people, and they haven't got heating and they're paying the full energy cost. It looks like the situation is getting worse."
The biggest issues have come outside the major cities of Moscow and St Petersburg, where the standard of living is deteriorating rapidly.
Magadan Oblast, in eastern Siberia, is about as far from the capital as you can get.
A local woman in the area posted a video of icicles coming from the interior of an apartment building, which has since gone viral.
"Is this normal? Everything is frozen. Absolutely everything. It's bitterly cold," she says.
If a dwelling's central heating stops working, the pipes can freeze and crack, meaning when it's eventually turned on again, water gushes inside.
One post claimed a neighbour's dog left home alone had been "boiled alive" when a pipe burst and their apartment flooded.
State media seldom highlights the issues, but even it has not been able to ignore the situation completely.
In Moscow, a video of dark brown liquid cascading from the ceiling of a university did the rounds online. Officials said it was water, but students claimed it was sewage.
"Despite titanic efforts to update all housing and communal-services systems, some of them remain in a dilapidated state," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters last week.
Last year, Sergei Pakhomov, a senior MP, told the state-run newspaper Izvestia some parts of the country were still serviced by 90-year-old asbestos water pipes.
"Asbestos would probably be good," Dr Mykhnenko said.
"I think old, old iron pipes in which clean water comes in and brown, dirty liquid comes out are a bigger issue."
'A factory producing bullets also has to supply heating for the local town'
Corruption is also entwined with the backlog.
Boiler executives in the city of Tver have been accused of embezzling 84 million roubles ($1.43 million) from residents' heating bills.
Meanwhile, in Podolsk, near Moscow, authorities arrested two senior executives and a regional official after a breakdown at a boiler plant left 22,000 people without heating last week.
The facility is owned by the Klimovsk Specialised Ammunition Plant, which is one of the country's largest firearm cartridge producers.
"You have this bizarre system in which a factory producing bullets also has to supply heating for the local town," Dr Mykhnenko said.
"And, the owner couldn't care less about that, obviously, because that's a cost, he's not going to recuperate.
"It creates enormous opportunities for corruption, taking money for repairs that are never done."
Amid increasing disquiet, Putin ordered the ammunition plant, and flailing boiler facility, be nationalised.
But with much of winter still to come, and the number of Russians freezing and frustrated growing, where the blame will lay for the chaos, is an important question ahead of March's election.
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