The Russian state always lies in a crisis, and Putin’s regime has shut down the truth-tellers. This inflicts enormous costs on Russians and maybe the rest of us.
In early October, the hospital in Shelekhov, a small town near Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, was quietly closed. Darya Shipilova, a 28-year-old technician at the city’s Anti-Plague Research Institute, had died of what local journalists said was pneumonic plague, the rare form that passes from person to person by coughing.
Some 200 contacts were put under observation, and more than 60 colleagues were confined to the institute. The Soviet-built anti-plague service did its job.
What nobody would do was name the disease. The mayor confirmed the quarantine without explaining it and told residents to ignore “rumors.” A local news site deleted its report on suspected plague, but forgot to remove the word from the web address.
Abroad, the silence was noticed. The World Health Organization (WHO) asked what had killed Shipilova, and about reports of a second sick employee. The European Commission called for “timely and transparent reporting,” the US State Department urged Moscow to “share accurate information quickly and openly,” and Donald Trump offered help.
Moscow denied everything. Rospotrebnadzor, the health watchdog, blamed “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and told the WHO that no plague case had been registered. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, repeated the mayor’s line: ignore the rumors. The hospitals stayed under quarantine all the same.
None of this is unusual for an authoritarian state. China spent the first weeks of 2020 silencing the Wuhan doctors who raised the alarm about Covid-19. The difference is what came after the lie: Beijing then threw everything at the problem, locking down a city of 11 million and rapidly building field hospitals. In Russia, denial is not the prelude to action but a substitute for it.
Shelekhov will probably be forgotten within a month. The reaction should not be: it shows a country gradually losing its capacity to prevent and absorb shocks.
Secrecy in a crisis is not new for Russia. In August 2000, after the submarine Kursk sank, the navy implied for days that it was in contact with the crew while refusing foreign help; all 118 men died. In 2002, special forces ended the Nord-Ost theatre siege with a gas they would not identify to doctors; 130 hostages died. In Beslan in 2004, officials put the number of hostages at about 350 when there were more than 1,100; 334 people died, 186 of them children.
The difference was that people talked back. Independent television savaged Putin over the Kursk, and he never forgave it. Reporters reached Beslan, though some were detained on the way. Lies were told, but they were contested.
In the summer of 2010, peat fires buried Moscow in smog for weeks. The mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, was away, and his office denied there was any emergency, until the city’s health chief, Andrei Seltsovsky, broke ranks and said deaths had doubled to about 700 a day. Researchers later estimated close to 11,000 excess deaths. The press would not let the story drop, Putin flew a water bomber for the cameras, and Luzhkov was soon dismissed for “loss of trust.” The system had lied, been caught, and paid a price.
That feedback loop has gone. The independent press is in exile, in jail, or silenced, and there is no Seltsovsky to blurt out the truth.
Consider this spring’s cattle cull in Siberia. Officials destroyed herds and sealed villages, blaming pasteurellosis and rabies, though the cull radius matched the foot-and-mouth protocol exactly. They denied any foot-and-mouth outbreak: Russia had been certified free of the disease only in 2025, and admitting otherwise would have hurt exports and careers. The only people asking questions were farmers on social media and the US Department of Agriculture.
Russians get their news from Telegram channels and rumors, which travel faster than any denial. The state has abandoned the field and blinded itself in the process. In 2020, Putin learned of a huge diesel spill in Norilsk from social media. A system that punishes bad news teaches officials to sit on it.
The late Soviet Union had the same problem. After Chornobyl’s reactor No. 4 exploded on 26 April 1986, Moscow said nothing until Swedish monitors detected the fallout two days later, let the May Day parade go ahead in Kyiv, and turned down initial Western offers of help. The disaster gave Gorbachev’s glasnost a push it would not otherwise have had.
Putin is no Gorbachev, and he is more remote than ever: absorbed by the war and visibly bored by unpleasant domestic detail. The Putin of the 2000s turned up in person at Beslan and, in 2018, in Kemerovo after a shopping-center fire killed 60 people. Now crises reach him in reports filtered by people who know what he prefers to hear. When a dam burst in Orsk in 2024, and residents chanted “Putin, help!”, he did not come. When Ukrainian troops crossed into the Kursk region that August, he promised evacuees 10,000 rubles (about $100) by video link and went there only after the region was retaken. He is slower and less curious than he was, and the war takes whatever attention he has.
In the 2000s, the Kremlin could buy its way out of embarrassment. With oil money pouring in, Beslan was rebuilt, and the Kursk families were compensated. That cushion is gone. The war swallows a huge share of the federal budget, and the regions, which pay recruits’ signing bonuses as well as running hospitals, utilities, and dams, are squeezed harder still. The 10,000 rubles did not reach many Kursk evacuees; Siberian farmers are still fighting for compensation. Repairs deferred for lack of money cause accidents, which then cost money nobody has. Ignored dam repairs, worn heating mains and run-down laboratories invite the next disaster.
None of this means the regime is about to collapse. The late Soviet state stagnated for two decades before everything gave way, and Putin’s security apparatus can still seal a hospital or catch a gunman within a day. What it can no longer do is see trouble coming, admit it has arrived, or pay to put it right.
That is a system with ever-smaller margins for error: fewer people to raise the alarm, a leader who doesn’t want to hear it, regional officials who will be jailed if they act and jailed if they don’t, and an empty purse. In such a system, a local accident can become a national crisis because nobody acted in time and there was no money to pour over it.
So the next small story to slip out of Russia — a quarantined hospital, a burst dam, a mysterious cattle cull — deserves more attention than its size suggests. Most will stay small. But a country that has switched off its own alarms will not know which are serious until it is too late. Nor will the Kremlin.
Alexander Kolyandr is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), specializing in the Russian economy and politics. He is Director, Europe for Eurasia Group and was previously a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a banker for Credit Suisse. He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and lives in London.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
