Hundreds of thousands of residents of central Russia faced a major loss of heating and electricity due to the extreme cold.
The most difficult situation is in the Podolski district near Moscow.
After several days of silence, the authorities of the city district and the Moscow Region assure that they are making the maximum effort to eliminate the problem, but admit that heating in the homes will not be available soon.
Power and heating outages during the New Year and Christmas holidays were reported in several regions of central Russia.
- The Nordic countries are bound by snow, but swimming outside does not stop
- Fighting the cold wave in Serbia: What to wear and what to bring
- "Half of the children don't even know what snow is": How the mildest winter since 1888 happened in some places in Serbia
Many residents of Yaroslavl and Leningrad Oblasts, Ryazan and Voronezh were left without heating and electricity, and it is often the only way to keep warm.
It is also cold in the solitaires in Khimki.
Some tenants say that there was heating only on the first floors, but not for those on higher floors.
There are also problems in Moscow, where on January 4, 40 buildings in the northeastern part of the city were left without electricity due to a fire in a substation.
The most massive heating problems were reported in Klimovsk near Moscow, an area southwest of Podolsk.
Due to an accident at one of the three boiler houses that supply hot water, tens of thousands of residents are freezing to death in more than 200 solitaires.
Like many other residents of Klimovsk, pensioner Elena Pokrovskaya woke up on January 4 in a rapidly cooling apartment.
Elena's kitchen oven is gas, but it was impossible to heat the rooms.
Then the power went out.
Her five-story building is among those served by the local boiler house.
The boiler room is in the area of a specialized cartridge factory, a high-security company.
The local authorities announced that due to the special status of the company, access to the boiler house was difficult.
Elena and hundreds of other residents immediately began calling dispatch, and were told that "the problems are being resolved."
Homes in several streets of Klimovska quickly cooled down to minus 20 degrees.
The regional hospital in Podolsk was also without heating.
Residents of Klimovsk, who were interviewed by BBC journalists in Russian, are furious that local media reported over the weekend that heating had returned to most homes.
"They announced on television that supposedly everything is switched on and that 90 percent of the houses are connected," says Elena Pokrovskaya.
"We correspond with each other and we know that everyone is freezing," he adds.
"When I complained, they told me that they restored our heating and that they no longer care about our neighborhood," says another resident, Klimovska.
Ksenija Aleksandrova lives not far from the boiler house.
The situation in Aleksandrova's apartment is gloomy.
He can't say exactly how many degrees it is in her apartment, but the electric radiator manages to warm it just enough to sleep only if they are fully clothed and under two blankets.
"You leave the room in the corridor and it's like you're on the street," says Ksenia and sniffs.
She lives in an apartment with her husband, grandmother, grandfather and two pets.
Nastja, a local resident, is a young mother of three children.
It quickly became clear to her that it was impossible to be in a cold apartment with children.
Nastya, like other families with children, was temporarily accommodated by the local authorities in the children's camp building.
In the past few days, she left work to turn on the electric radiator in the old two-story apartment, but the temperature was only slightly above zero.
She also took the children to work because there is no one to leave them with.
"The pipes have been frozen for a long time. There is ice on the inside of the window of the apartment. We come to the apartment and direct the electric radiator to heat the pipes so they don't burst."
Since everyone else is doing roughly the same thing, the electricity in the old two-story house often goes out.
The pipe on the staircase of Nastja's building has already cracked.
Pipe bursts and hot water leaks are another problem in Klimovsk.
Workers are coming from the Moscow region to patch the broken pipes, but they have their hands full.
"One day they managed to turn on the heating in the bathroom, but the very next day it was cold again," says Ksenia Aleksandrova.
"The pipe was hot in the bathroom, and freezing in the rooms. Now it's freezing in the bathroom too," she adds.
While Nastya does not hope that the problem will be solved quickly, because they are on the outskirts, Ksenia Aleksandrova, whose home is closer to the boiler house, says that the problems have continued.
"They announced that they had restored the heating, and on January 1 and 3, radiator pipes burst in the entrance. This is a deception, they haven't fixed anything, and the problems continue," she complains.
- What are heat pumps and are they the future of heating in Serbia
- Four ways to lower your electricity bill without using less energy
- Who are the energy-poor residents of Serbia?
A third of the pension for heating
Heating bills in Klimovsk are high.
From her pension, which is 15.000 rubles, Elena Borovkova allocates 8.700 rubles per month (about 87 euros) for a two-room apartment of 44 square meters.
The rest of the pension is not enough to live on.
Recently, she got a temporary job as a nurse in a hospital where they treat wounded people transferred from the front in Ukraine.
But Elena's son disappeared during the war, and she says she couldn't bear to stay in that hospital.
Now I got a job as a nurse at a local clinic, she says.
At the meeting of the governor of the Moscow region, Andrey Vorobyov, and the residents who are temporarily housed in the local sports center "Junost", it was announced that the vulnerable people of Klimovsk will not be charged for heating in January.
Considering how much electricity they used trying to heat themselves with electrical appliances, they were promised that their electricity bills would be at the December level.
All this, the authorities say, will be paid for by the owners of the boiler house that went out of business.
But the governor fails to make contact with them.
In the video released by Vorobyev's administration, the governor is standing outside the factory in the company of security officers.
"We can solve this in two ways - to initiate criminal proceedings or they decide to pay themselves.
"I appeal to the Investigative Committee to go to court in order to put the boiler house into operation, hire staff and carry out a complete audit," says Vorobyov.
One of those present assured the governor that criminal proceedings had already been initiated.
Locals note that, regardless of whose hands the boiler house is in and in whose area it is located, the condition of the pipes that go from it to the city is obviously not good, and the municipal authorities are to blame for this.
While the problems continue, every announcement by the head of the Podolsk city district about the gradual normalization is now accompanied by dozens of comments that homes are still cold and dark.
Follow us on Facebook,Twitter i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
