Kyiv is freezing in the dark as Russian strikes leave Ukraine’s capital powerless
Information technology executive Maryna, who did not want to disclose her last name because her husband serves in the military, told NBC News that she and her 4-year-old son, Martin, were hiding from Russian strikes in their hallway. Now “it would be too cold to sleep there,” Maryna said, forcing her to prioritize comfort over safety.
There has been no heat in her apartment since the Jan. 9 attack, Maryna said, so she and Martin wear thermal underwear and huddle under blankets to feel some degree of comfort inside, where the temperature hovers around 40 degrees. She said Martin, born three months before the full-scale invasion of 2022, is used to this reality of war and “knows no other way.”
Translator Kateryna Matiukhina, who lives in the western city of Lviv with her 7-year-old daughter Ivanna, was in kyiv last month to visit her husband Heorhii for the winter holidays.
Since power cuts began in the capital, people have been without electricity for 31 hours straight, said Matiukhina, 39. “Planning needs to go to the next level,” she added when the power returns sporadically at night. She can only dream of washing her hair, Matiukhina said, because basic household chores and cooking for her daughter take priority.
They’re trying to maintain a sense of normalcy for Ivanna’s sake, she said, trying to “keep it fun” for her with flashlights, twinkle lights and candlelight dinners. “We don’t want to overwhelm it,” she added.
Residents of kyiv told NBC News that it was the coldest winter they had experienced at least since the start of the war, with such low temperatures unusual in kyiv even in January. Despite the bitter cold, some said they still try to visit winter wonderlands and enjoy the snow, even going so far as to take their children sledding. Social media videos verified by NBC News show Kyiv residents dancing and cooking outside with their neighbors in freezing temperatures.
Some suspect that the bitter cold is precisely why the Kremlin has decided to launch such a massive attack on energy infrastructure now.
“The Russians intended to strike when it was cold. We understand that. It’s not an accident,” said Liubov Oliinyk, 62, a kyiv resident. “They did it in the most painful way.”
The outages were particularly distressing for Oliinyk’s 89-year-old father, Leonid, who lives alone, also in kyiv. He can’t turn on the television or read a book in the dark, she said, and it’s difficult for him to move around his house without lights because of his vision impairment. “He continues to remember World War II as a child,” Oliinyk added. “He said, ‘When the Germans came, we had no heat, no water, no electricity for the whole war, and we kept going.’ So he’s optimistic in that way.
Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, this week accused Russia of targeting energy infrastructure despite extensive and well-documented public reporting of serious consequences for civilians. He said in a speech in Geneva that “it is appalling to see civilians suffering in this way”, warning that targeting civilians “is a blatant violation of the rules of war”. Russia denies intentionally targeting civilians, despite strikes that reduced entire Ukrainian cities to rubble and documented killings of civilians throughout the war.
Ukraine, for its part, continued its strikes in regions bordering Russia, in the hope of making Putin suffer on its own territory. Authorities in the Belgorod border region have blamed kyiv for the attacks, which they say left 600,000 people without electricity, heat or water around the same time as the January 9 Russian strikes. The region’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on Sunday that work to restore electricity was almost complete, as the crisis in Ukraine continues to worsen.
Zelensky called the Russian attacks that led to Ukraine’s energy crisis “discrediting the diplomatic process.” Zelensky met with President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday and later announced that Ukrainian and Russian teams would hold their first trilateral meeting with U.S. officials in the coming days. But despite a flurry of diplomatic activity to end the war, no peace deal is still in sight.
For some stuck in kyiv, diplomatic wrangling seems like a distant reality.
Maryna, the IT manager, said she had little confidence the negotiations would achieve peace on terms that would not amount to Ukraine’s capitulation.
“I think their goal is to destroy us, so peace negotiations will get us nowhere,” she said. But the freezing temperatures will eventually thaw, she said, adding: “We can’t make concessions because we’re cold.
Anastasiia Parafeniuk reported from Kyiv and Yuliya Talmazan from London.
