Russian Regions Refuse to Sound Air-Raid Sirens to Hide Scale of Ukrainian Strikes, Intelligence Says

Regional authorities across Russia are increasingly refusing to sound air-raid sirens during reported missile and drone threats, an effort to disguise how often strikes now reach Russian territory.

This was reported by Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service on its official website on June 22.

The service noted that the justifications vary from region to region but share a single purpose: preserving the image of calm that the Kremlin works to maintain at any cost. Attacks have grown frequent enough, it is assessed, that honest warnings would shatter that picture.

In temporarily occupied Crimea, the report stated, the Russian-installed administration decided to stop reacting to every drone overflight. It cited Crimean official Oleg Kryuchkov, who explained that a signal for each one would leave the alarm sounding as much as 22 hours a day.

In Rostov, the findings described, officials justified dropping sirens by pointing to practice in the occupied "LNR" and "DNR,"  where residents reportedly rush outside during alerts, allegedly doubling the risk of casualties.

Yaroslavl officials stated plainly that sirens are withheld to avoid panic, the service added. Krasnodar authorities declined to equate "drone danger" with civil-defense alerts, while Ryazan region officials argued that frequent sirens would lose their force as an emergency signal.

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According to the assessment, authorities in the Moscow-region town of Kotelniki went further, refusing even to disclose the addresses of shelters and bomb shelters. Officials there indicated that residents would receive that information only "during mobilization and in wartime."

Residents of Moscow and the surrounding region have meanwhile complained of receiving no alerts or sirens at all, the report added. Officials defended the silence by claiming that mass notification in an ambiguous situation could cause more harm than the threat itself, provoking panic and chaos.

The service singled out the head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, whose explanation it called the most revealing. He attributed the move away from daily sirens to rising antidepressant use across Russia, which the agency read as an admission that sustained strikes are damaging the population's psychological state.

The intelligence findings concluded that the silence of sirens is no longer a logistical question but one of political survival for a leadership that spent years projecting a war that supposedly never touched ordinary Russians.

The withholding of shelter information reflects a broader pattern extending to the capital itself, where authorities have recently refused to reveal the locations of civil defense facilities, citing the absence of any officially declared war.

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