A summary from Reddit user Gorperly:
The goings on in Dagestan are mostly below the radar but I think they’re extremely notable. Dagestan is in the midst of a full-on services and utilities collapse.
Dagestan, one of the most corrupt regions in Russia, is just the first domino to fall due to systemic failures that affect the rest of Putin’s crumbling empire. The root cause of a lot of recent disasters is wide-scale construction without investing into infrastructure. Typical for Putin, his officials double-dip: they profit off of illegal construction, and they flat-out steal from utilities. Secondly, Dagestan is a majorly non-ethnically Russian region that has been one of the hardest-hit by war casualties and conscription. There aren’t enough qualified specialists left to smoothly run the already skeletal infrastructure.
In the latest chapter, a giant explosion took place in the capital Makhachkala a few hours ago. The explosion was right next to a newly constructed mall. There are scant details:
A building caught fire near the Globus shopping center, the city administration reports. Eyewitnesses talk about a loud explosion in a car service. The fire later spread to a gas station.
According to the Dagestan Center for Disaster Medicine, five people were killed in the explosion and another ten were injured. At the same time, the telegram channel Baza reported that more than 50 people were injured as a result of the incident. According to Shot there are at least 70 victims.
Other telegram videos show post-apocalyptic scenes in a hospital as more and more victims are brought in.
https://t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/18689
This is happening in the background of a major heatwave. Large swaths of population have been without electricity and water on and off, sparking spontaneous protests.
Dagestan’s ongoing utilities crisis saw another major protest on Sunday night. The residents of Karaman-2, a settlement outside of the region’s capital Makhachkala, blocked the federal Makhachkala–Astrakhan highway, trying to draw attention to the dire water-supply situation in the area.
According to some participants, their homes had been without running water for the whole summer.
On August 9, Makhachkala residents resorted to similar tactics to protest power supply disruptions that left many Dagestani homes without electricity for three days in a row,