One year has passed in St. Petersburg since Игорь Гром toppled the Plague Doctor, only to learn that the man behind the mask was a billionaire philanthropist, Сергей Разумовский. The city’s favorite police major remains a towering, controversial figure, and his notoriety seems to grow even as the danger does. Together with his steady foil, Дмитрий Дубин, Гром still wields brute force to solve the most brutal crises, this time proving his authority by quelling a violent riot inside the Central Prison of Saint Petersburg. The two officers’ method—swift, decisive, sometimes reckless—establishes a pattern that the city both relies on and fears.
Meanwhile, a different kind of power struggle unfolds at the top. Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, Lieutenant General Мария Архипова, is pushing ahead with a sweeping police reform that leans on unmanned drones to replace significant segments of the force. She travels to St. Petersburg to compare drone capabilities, and she watches a demonstration where a single Holt International device touts the ability to neutralize targets faster than conventional teams. Yet Arkhipova hesitates to sign a contract with the inventor and company head, Август ван der Хольт, whose earlier invention—the Plague Doctor costume—made Razumovsky’s notoriety possible.
On a more personal note, Юлия Пчёлкина spends time with Гром during a date that turns suddenly perilous. An attempt on their lives sets off a pursuit of a masked suspect, and a brutal combat sequence ends with Гром tumbling from a window. A telltale mark—the logo “15:26” on the attacker’s hand—forces Гром to confront a chilling pattern behind the city’s string of tragedies. This new enemy, known to the populace (and to Гром) as Ghost, launches a deadly game by phone, triggering a cascade of terrorist attacks that shake the city to its core: the Alexandria Column explodes, followed by a blast at Peterhof. Grom moves from beloved hero to a man under pressure, as his reputation sinks from adoration to public scorn.
As the body count rises, Гром’s suspicions zero in on van der Holt, the industrial magnate whose drones loom large in Arkhipova’s tests. In a tense confrontation during a decisive negotiation, Гром bursts in, trying to derail the deal that would entrust the city’s safety to machines. The situation becomes personal for his boss, Фёдор Прокопенко, who resigns to protect his protégé from bearing the blame. Parallel investigations lead Lieutenant Dmitry Dubin to the prison riot’s orchestrator, Leonid Фролов, who makes a desperate escape before his car is destroyed. Dubin discovers a troubling clue: Razumovsky’s explosives, once thought to be a thing of the past, have vanished from the police evidence vault just as the drones’ control becomes central to the city’s security.
Yulia continues her own line of inquiry, turning to Razumovsky’s psychiatrist, Вениамин Рубинштейн, for insight. Through him, she learns about Razumovsky’s fractured psyche and discovers a hermit tied to the “15:26” mark who reveals a chilling truth: the mysterious Ghost is Razumovsky’s old ally, the mercenary [Олег Вольков] (the name appears in the investigation as Volkov), Razumovsky’s childhood friend who was believed dead in Syria. The trail leads to a dramatic interception where van der Holt attempts to finish Volkov off, only for Volkov to overpower the capture unit led by Otto Шрайбер, Отто Шрайбер.
The stakes escalate when Pchyolkina publicly reveals Volkov’s identity, prompting a city-wide search that ends at a dilapidated base. There, a tense assault reveals Razumovsky in the same building, while Volkov dies in an explosion right in front of [Игорь Гром]. In a confrontation that blends physical combat with psychological warfare, Гром storms the psychiatric hospital to reach Razumovsky. A brutal exchange with Razumovsky exposes the latter’s split personality—one persona forcing Razumovsky to act, the other (the Bird) driving a separate, deadly agenda. The confrontation turns personal, and Гром is momentarily subdued and taken to Сергей Разумовский himself, where the truth about Razumovsky’s condition comes into sharper focus, as Rubinstein (the attending psychiatrist) explains the shifting iris color marking the split.
With Razumovsky’s two personalities pulling the strings, Volkov launches a mass-murder plan aimed at the city’s metro system. The drones, previously the symbol of order, threaten to become weapons of indiscriminate harm as authorities scramble to regain control. Dubin, Пчёлкина, and Гром collaborate to abduct Razumovsky, dragging him toward Volkov’s trap while a wounded Dubin fights to stay in the game. The trio escapes a cascade of explosions and reaches Volkov in a showdown that pits high-tech weaponry against raw will. Razumovsky, still under the influence of his Bird persona, shoots Volkov, revealing the broader scheme of revenge that has threaded these events together.
As the final pieces fall into place, Razumovsky’s bombs are defused, and the drones—turned toward the true threats—are reactivated. Razumovsky’s death, and his final moment of release from the Bird’s control, leaves the city mourning its dead and the drones’ deadly promise undone for the moment. Volkov is captured, and Гром faces trial, deciding to acknowledge his responsibility and resign from the police. The film closes with a post-credits coda in which Thunder’s eyes flicker to yellow, and Rubinstein reviews Razumovsky’s file, hinting that the game may not be finished, even as one era ends and another begins.
In this sprawling, high-stakes thriller, the line between hero and villain blurs as the city navigates a future where drones and digital warfare collide with age-old questions of power, loyalty, and justice. The ensemble cast—led by Игорь Гром and anchored by the gravitas of Сергей Разумовский and Вениамин Рубинштейн—drives a complex, action-packed narrative that stays true to its source while expanding the mythos of this modern hero.
