Electricity pricing scam in northern Russia

In the Pskov region, bills have skyrocketed to over 30,000 rubles per month without any notification of the rate increase, while in Chechnya or Dagestan, the government turns a blind eye to the billions of rubles owed for energy supplies, without suspending services.

Mosca (AsiaNews) - Since January of this year, the inhabitants of the Pskov region in north-western Russia have unexpectedly received electricity bills twice as high as the previous month, without the Pskovenergosbyt services agency having deemed it necessary to inform them of the increase. The problem has also occurred in other northern regions, such as the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic, and journalists from Okno (‘The Window’) have tried to understand how the inhabitants of these areas are reacting.

In reality, by the summer of 2024 all of Russia's more than 100 federal subjects had switched to differentiated use of electricity, whereby the tariff was regulated according to usage, in an attempt to counter the mining of privileged tariffs in the energy market. The price is greatly influenced by electric heating, from which advantages are sought depending on the technologies accessible to different homes, and it is the regional authorities that establish the allocation quotas, which also differ between cities and rural areas.

In the Pskov region, based on these changes, such exaggerated increases were not expected, with bills even over 30 thousand rubles per month (300 euros). ‘We were stunned,’ says Artem Gradov, a resident of the Pechora province, “when in January I received an additional payment of 6,500 rubles on top of the usual 12,000... I started searching on the internet, where I found explanations accompanied by very suggestive winter images, but that didn't ease my concerns at all: we have to go back to using torches”. Artem lives with his wife and 5-year-old daughter in the village of Lazarevo, in a recently built house where the rooms heat up well and quickly, and knowing about the increases he could have adjusted the radiators differently, which in Russia are habitually kept at maximum power.

In the Pskov region, moreover, the percentages of heating allocations are much lower than those of St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad region, and also of Kaliningrad. This means that the inhabitants of Pskov move to the higher tariffs much more quickly, ending up paying much higher amounts, if the inhabitants don't manage to regulate themselves in time, which is not usual in Russia, where since Soviet times electricity and heating have depended on centralised services. In recent years, with the restructuring of the economy due to the war, this system has been replaced by a local and personalised one, without any real assistance from the regional administrations.

Conditions are also dependent on very arbitrary and questionable criteria, so in separatist and de facto occupied Abkhazia, electricity is supplied free of charge by the Russians, and in regions of the northern Caucasus such as Chechnya and Dagestan, the government turns a blind eye to the billions of dollars owed for energy supplies, without suspending services, while in the north citizens are forced to pay astronomical rates. Information about the increases arrived after the bills, preceded only by a few hints about ‘possible changes’ without indicating terms and conditions.

Since last year residents have been issued with ‘energy licences’, but the vast majority of citizens still live with the automatic mechanisms inherited from Soviet times, without being able to orient themselves with the various provisions. All the more so because the system of municipal and regional services is still extremely complex: in order to get all the information they need, citizens have to contact more than 30 competent institutions, and the supply systems don't seem to be improving following the tariff increases. In the same region of Pskov, heavy snowfalls in January left about 20 thousand inhabitants without electricity for a long time, and the year before there had been even more snowfalls. The economic changes in war-torn Russia are only now modifying the Soviet mechanisms of social services for citizens, creating hardships that are destined to increase more and more.