Vladimir Putin’s failure to address the collapse of the sewer system in Pushkino, a Moscow suburb, reveals both the regime’s systemic incompetence and its utter disregard for the basic welfare of its citizens.
The fact that raw sewage has been contaminating the local water supply for three months, with residents pleading for intervention, exposes not just a decayed infrastructure but a decayed governance model.
The Russian state, under Putin’s rule, has funneled resources into war, propaganda, and elite enrichment while allowing essential public services to deteriorate into third-world conditions.
Moscow, the crown jewel of Putin’s authoritarian grip, cannot even guarantee its suburbs a functioning sewage system, a fundamental requirement of civilization. The regime, obsessed with projecting strength through military adventurism and nuclear rhetoric, appears incapable of managing basic municipal functions.
This is not just an infrastructure failure—it is a microcosm of Putin’s governance: a Potemkin state where appearances matter more than substance, where megaprojects and lavish parades are prioritized over running water and public health.
The situation in Pushkino suggests an alarming level of administrative paralysis.
The government’s bloated bureaucracy, steeped in corruption and inefficiency, has neither the will nor the competence to fix a problem that could lead to a cholera epidemic. Even Soviet planners, despite their failures, understood the necessity of robust public utilities. Yet under Putin, Russia has regressed to an era where open sewage runs through towns while the state’s resources are drained into an unwinnable war and the pockets of oligarchs.
The Kremlin-controlled media, designed to distract the population with narratives of Western decadence and NATO conspiracies, cannot hide the stench of literal human waste flooding into Russian homes. No amount of state-sponsored disinformation can mask the fact that the Putin regime has allowed its own citizens to drink sewage water. If Putin were even remotely competent at governance rather than repression, this crisis would have been resolved long before residents were forced to beg their “dear leader” for help.
This debacle further exposes Putin’s so-called stability as a sham. Russia is a resource-rich country, yet its people live with infrastructure failures that should belong to failed states, not the self-proclaimed great power of the 21st century. A regime that can’t fix sewers has no credibility to wage wars, dictate global affairs, or claim technological and military superiority. The Pushkino disaster is not just a local scandal—it is a glaring indictment of Putin’s entire rule.
