Authorities in the southwestern Belgorod region will organize emergency commissions to handle a surge of complaints over widespread utility outages, coming after the region’s governor warned that residents of the capital would be without hot water until April following a Ukrainian air attack on critical infrastructure.
Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said during a government meeting on Monday that the commissions would operate out of district offices in the capital city of Belgorod and be overseen by state housing inspectors and the regional Housing and Communal Services Ministry.
Writing on Telegram, Gladkov said the commissions would recalculate utility bills to ensure residents are not charged for services that were disrupted.
“Residents should not and will not pay for services that were not delivered,” he said, adding that costs related to generators, fuel and maintenance would be covered by the regional government.
The governor ordered the commissions to begin work by next Monday. They will operate until the end of April.
The move follows Gladkov’s warning over the weekend that the city of Belgorod’s roughly 320,000 residents would be without hot water until the end of the heating season in April after a Ukrainian missile strike damaged the city’s thermal power plant.
Two people were killed and five others injured in that attack, which took place on Friday, regional authorities said.
Late Sunday, Gladkov said the city’s energy infrastructure had suffered “serious damage,” and local media reported that some neighborhoods had begun experiencing heating outages.
Since January, people living in the Belgorod region have endured recurring outages of electricity, water and heating amid continued cross-border attacks.
Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid have also caused mass utility outages there.
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