Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are bracing for several days of punishing winter weather with little access to heat or electricity, after a renewed wave of Russian missile and drone strikes crippled large parts of the country’s energy infrastructure.
In Kyiv, the situation is especially grim. Forecasts show temperatures staying well below freezing, accompanied by sharp winds, for at least the next four days. City officials warn that the cold snap comes at a time when power supplies are already stretched to the breaking point.
“We just need to survive the next few days, which will be extremely difficult for Kyiv,” Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said on Sunday in a message posted to Telegram. He warned that severe overnight frosts were expected to intensify the hardship facing residents.
Klitschko described Ukraine’s energy system as being in “an extremely difficult situation” and said he had ordered the city’s emergency “heating points” — public shelters powered by generators — to operate at full capacity. Some of these centers allow residents to stay overnight to escape the cold.
According to Ukraine’s energy ministry, many people in the capital are receiving electricity for only one and a half to two hours per day, forcing families to ration heat, light and phone charging.
For some residents, the crisis has already become unbearable. One Kyiv man who lived on the top floor of a 16-story apartment building said an early January strike cut off heating, electricity and water to his home. A subsequent attack hit the power plant supplying heat to his building and more than 1,100 others across the city.
As temperatures plunged, the apartment’s indoor temperature fell to just 3 degrees Celsius (37.4 degrees Fahrenheit). With repairs expected to take up to two months — the coldest stretch of winter — roughly half the residents moved out, including his family.
Businesses are also struggling to cope. The Backstage Beauty Salon chain said it spent about $400,000 on backup systems such as generators, fuel and batteries to stay open. Even so, a drone strike hit one of its locations, bursting a heating pipe and flooding the salon.
“Despite all this spending, weather conditions and Russian attacks prevail over the system,” the company said in a post on Instagram.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that attacks on civilian and energy targets have become an almost daily occurrence. In a single week, he said, Russia launched more than 2,000 strike drones, 1,200 guided aerial bombs and 116 missiles of various types at Ukrainian cities and villages.
Ukraine’s national grid operator, Ukrenergo, said it is still dealing with the fallout from two large-scale attacks earlier in the week. The level of damage, it said, makes it impossible to lift emergency blackouts in most regions, though repair work has slightly eased outages in some areas.
Restoration efforts are ongoing at power plants and high-voltage substations, including those supplying electricity to nuclear facilities. Another major energy operator, DTEK, said damage to key substations has reduced nuclear power output, sharply cutting the amount of electricity available nationwide.
The latest strikes came after a brief, informal pause in attacks on energy infrastructure, encouraged by the United States. Zelensky said Washington had proposed renewing the de-escalation initiative, a plan Ukraine accepted, while Russia has yet to respond.
Analysts say the renewed barrage underscores Moscow’s intent. The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted that Russia carried out two major strike waves involving more than 400 projectiles within days of the moratorium’s collapse, signaling a determination to intensify civilian suffering rather than ease tensions.
The institute also said Russian forces have adapted their weapons to cause greater damage, including modifying Shahed drones with mines and cluster munitions — changes that have disproportionately affected civilian neighborhoods and energy facilities.
The impact is especially severe in cities that rely on centralized heating systems, a holdover from the Soviet era. Heat generated at large plants is distributed across entire districts, meaning a single strike can leave thousands of apartments without warmth. Prolonged outages during freezing weather can also cause underground pipes to crack when water inside them freezes, compounding the damage.
Some experts believe these vulnerabilities are deliberately exploited. “The Russian military is being advised by energy specialists on how to cause maximum damage to the system,” DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko said as early as 2022.
For many Ukrainians, the coming days are about endurance rather than comfort — holding on through the cold, the darkness and the uncertainty, hoping that repairs come before winter tightens its grip even further.
