Over 100,000 Moscow region residents have lost heat this year. The man being blamed for the largest outage has a criminal past.

On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin ordered the nationalization of the Klimovsk Ammunition Plant, a gun cartridge factory in the Moscow region where a mechanical failure last week caused tens of thousands of people to lose heating. The Kremlin has praised the local authorities for their response to the crisis, despite the fact that more than 170 apartment buildings reportedly still lacked heating as of Tuesday afternoon.

The outages, which affected over 20,000 people in the town of Podolsk, began when a heating main in the Klimovsk plant burst on January 4. In the days that followed, temperatures in the area dipped below -20 degree Celsius (-4 degree Fahrenheit), leaving residents struggling to stay warm.

It wasn’t until January 7, however, that Moscow Governor Andrey Vorobyov first acknowledged the crisis. According to the outlet Agentstvo, the governor turned off the comment function on his Telegram channel soon after, presumably to cut off the flood of complaints he was receiving.

On January 8, Vorobyov announced that residents of the Klimovsk microdistrict, where the outage occurred, would be exempt from paying their heating bills in January. He also promised to compensate them for any additional expenses they incurred. The authorities also offered free accomodations in the town of Naro-Fominsk, about an hour away from Podolsk, for residents without heat.

That evening, Vladimir Putin instructed the Emergency Situations Ministry to “take all necessary measures” to deal with the Podolsk outages. Shortly after that, the Russian Investigative Committee reported it had arrested the general director of the Klimovsk Ammunition Plant as well as the head of the facility’s boiler room in connection with a previously opened case concerning safety violations. Additionally, the deputy mayor of Podolsk was arrested for allegedly having signed a form approving the boiler room’s condition without actually inspecting it.

The heat outage in Podolsk is the largest one to have occurred in the Moscow region so far in 2024, but it’s not the only one. Regional authorities reported similar accidents and outages in the towns of Lytkarino, Solnechnogorsk, Voskresensk, Sergiev Posad, Balashikha, Khimki, and Shchelkovo, among others. More than 100,000 people in the region have lost power at least once since the year began.

From crime boss to factory head

It appears not to be the first time that the general director of the Klimovsk Ammunition Plant, who the outlet RBC named as Igor Kushnikov, has faced criminal charges. In the 1990s, he reportedly went on trial for allegedly leading an organized crime syndicate.

After a stint at the Federal Security Service (FSB), Igor Kushnikov established a private security company called Berkut in 1992. The newspaper Kommersant reported that Kushnikov used his new firm to provide cover to an organized crime group while supplying its members with weapons, equipment, and special passes preventing police from searching their vehicles.

The gang’s alleged leaders, including Kushnikov, went on trial in 1999. According to investigators, the group was responsible for over 40 murders, but only four were included in the final indictment, in addition to charges of banditry, extortion, and illegal weapons trafficking.

According to Kommersant, “to say that the case fell apart would be a massive understatement”: some witnesses refused to testify in court, and much of the physical evidence in the case was lost. By 2002, when Kushnikov was found guilty of abusing his power, the statute of limitations had expired and he was released.