Regional authorities in Russia are increasingly refusing to activate sirens during missile or drone threat alerts. The wording varies from region to region, but the essence is the same: the attacks have become so frequent that honest warnings about them would destroy the image of calm that the Kremlin is trying to maintain at any cost.
In occupied Crimea, the local “administration” has decided not to respond to every drone overflight. Crimean official Oleg Kryuchkov explained it bluntly: if an alarm sounded every time, it would not stop for up to 22 hours a day.
In Rostov, the refusal to use sirens was justified by citing practices in the so-called LPR and DPR, where people allegedly run outside during alerts, supposedly doubling the risk of casualties.
In Yaroslavl, officials said directly that sirens are not used in order to avoid panic. In Krasnodar, authorities took a different approach and split the signals: “drone danger” is not officially treated as a civil defense alert, unlike an air raid warning. In the Ryazan region, the explanation is even more cynical: frequent sirens would stop being perceived as an emergency signal, so it is better not to use them at all.
In Kotelniki, Moscow region, local authorities went further and even refused to disclose the locations of shelters and bomb shelters to residents. According to officials, this information will only be provided “during mobilization and wartime” — a formulation that itself reveals how far the Kremlin is pushing the moment of honesty with its own population.
Meanwhile, residents of Moscow and the Moscow region are mass-complaining about the absence of any alerts or air-raid sirens. The official explanation from the authorities sounds almost like propaganda: mass alerts in unclear situations could allegedly cause more harm than the threat itself by provoking panic and chaos.
The most telling comment came from the head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov. He justified the refusal to use daily sirens by pointing to the rising use of antidepressants in Russia, effectively acknowledging what the Kremlin has long tried to deny: constant attacks are damaging the population’s psychological state, and the authorities fear not the drones themselves, but people’s reaction to the truth about them.
In essence, all these explanations come down to one point: the scale of strikes on Russian territory has become so significant that silence from sirens is no longer a logistical issue. It is now a matter of political survival for a regime that has long tried to maintain the image of a war that does not affect ordinary Russians.
