“Wait ‘til it gets cold—really cold, Ukrainian cold,” a friend warned when I arrived in Kyiv in 2022. I didn’t know what he meant until this year—recent winters here, like almost everywhere, have been relatively mild. But 2026 is a throwback: it’s been snowing off and on for weeks, and temperatures, at their lowest in years, are hovering between 5 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and colder at night. Vladimir Putin is trying to weaponize the frigid weather with huge drone and missile strikes every few days, knocking out heat, water, and electricity in Kyiv and other cities. But if his goal is to freeze Ukrainians into submission, breaking their will, it isn’t working. If anything, they are more determined to resist.
Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since winter 2022. But this year is different—not just the weather, but also the scale and ferocity of Putin’s attacks. The bombardments escalated in December, and after nearly two months, they have come to seem a way of life. In Kyiv, there are air alerts virtually every night, punctuated every few days by a particularly savage attack. On January 9, Moscow launched 242 drones and 36 missiles, knocking out electricity across 70 percent of Ukraine’s capital and leaving some 6,000 apartment buildings without heat. The January 20 assault of 339 drones and 34 rockets included a Zircon hypersonic missile designed to destroy a warship. January 23 brought another 375 drones and 21 missiles, including another dreaded Zircon.
Ukrainian energy companies and attacking Russians play a macabre game of cat-and-mouse. After each assault, the companies scramble to repair the damage, often completing the task only to have the enemy strike again. On the morning of January 23, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko announced that two-thirds of the damage from the previous bombardment had been repaired, leaving fewer than 2,000 buildings without heat. By the next morning, the tally again approached 6,000—roughly half the city’s housing stock, in many cases buildings that been without heat the week before.
Some neighborhoods are living with a brutal trifecta—no heat, water, or electricity. Schools are closed for the month. Snow and ice blanket the city; authorities don’t do a very good job of plowing, and at least one person has died after slipping on the ice. The CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, has declared a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Several thousand state-run “invincibility centers,” scattered across the city in heated tents and public buildings, offer warmth, hot drinks, and a place to charge a phone. Mayor Klitschko has urged anyone who can leave Kyiv to do so, and his office says 600,000 of nearly 3 million residents have left—most of them to stay with friends and relatives elsewhere in Ukraine.
Life goes on downtown: shops, bars, restaurants, and cafes are as lively as ever. But many Ukrainians feel forgotten by the world, as global news centers on the World Economic Forum in Davos and Donald Trump invites Putin to join his Orwellian Board of Peace.
I have it relatively easy. My high-rise apartment building can afford a generator to keep the elevators running and the lights on in common areas. I have two car-battery-size power stations that I charge when the electricity is flowing, then use to keep the lights on in my apartment when the power goes out. Things get tricky when the outages, which sometimes drag on for more than 24 hours, outlast the battery, which can’t power the stove, so I only cook when there is electricity.
But even in my pampered building, the knock-on effects can be cruel. Every few days, the generator runs out of fuel, and it’s often hard to find a resupply in a besieged city where tens of thousands of generators, large and small, are churning day and night. So too replacement parts for my power stations: When one of them blew out last month, it took nearly three weeks to repair it—so like everyone, I keep a store of candles ready. A few times each week, the extreme cold freezes a water pipe in our building, and we go without water for a day or so. Personally, I find that the hardest. Few things are more dehumanizing than life without plumbing.
Last week, I crossed the Dnipro River that bisects the city to visit a less fortunate neighborhood on what’s known as the Left Bank. Settled much later than the rest of the capital, it boasts luxury high-rises along the river, but also vast swaths of Soviet-era apartment blocks—drab, squat buildings with small rooms and low ceilings, made of the cheapest of construction materials and with only the most minimal of attention to human comfort. Russian strikes on energy transmission lines have cut much of the Left Bank off from generating hubs across the river, leaving many buildings without light or heat for weeks.
One building I visit in the Rusanivka neighborhood has had no heating since the devastating strike on January 9. Water was restored a few days ago, but it only runs cold, and there is still almost no electricity. Katya—like everyone I meet in the building, she declines to give her last name—invites me to her apartment. An HR manager in her early 40s with long, curly hair, she left Ukraine when Russia invaded in 2022 but recently returned, drawn by a sense of patriotic duty. She uses her phone to light the way as we trudge up to her sixth-floor flat—elevators are a distant memory. It’s cheerful enough, lit by battery-powered Christmas lights and the wan winter light filtering in through a few small windows, and she shows me where she’s been spending her days—propped up in bed, under a heavy duvet. “We’ll survive,” she says breezily as I leave the apartment. “We’re Ukrainians.”
I meet Liudmyla, 88, in the stairwell, as she heads up to her flat on the 14th floor. When I ask how often she makes the climb, she tells me it’s generally twice a day—she cares for several neighbors’ cats along with her own and must feed them. A tiny creature bundled in several coats and a furry hat, Liudmyla jokes that I should be jealous of her new, powerful leg muscles. She has a gas stove but tries not to use it—who knows how long the outages will last?—and hasn’t bathed in nearly two weeks. But if she feels any self-pity, I don’t see it. She’s proud of her grandson fighting on the eastern front and determined to outlast the energy strikes. “It’s just two more months,” she says, “and then spring will come and then summer, and eventually we’ll beat them.”
Caleb Carr, the historian and novelist, explained what I saw in Rusanivka in his 2002 book on warfare against civilians. Man has been waging what Carr called “punitive” campaigns against noncombatants since Roman times, if not before. Still, the effect is almost always the same: instead of beating the targeted population into submission, attacks on civilians generally strengthen their resolve.
In Ukraine, according to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll conducted the week after the January 9 strike, 69 percent of respondents doubted that Trump’s peace process would end the conflict, and 77 percent felt Ukraine “could continue effective resistance.”
The energy blitz has brought the war home to many who had grown accustomed to living far from the front. There’s a new solidarity on display in the social media “house chat” in my apartment building—people willing to help their neighbors and pitch in to keep the lights on. Social media is also full of posts about the DTEK maintenance crews working around the clock to restore power. Several corporate chains are giving them free food and hot drinks, and many residents revere them with a gratitude once reserved for soldiers fighting in the East.
No one thinks they’ve seen the last strike on the nation’s critical infrastructure. Hard as the maintenance crews work to repair energy substations and transmission lines, it’s far more difficult in wartime to restore the facilities that generate electricity, and national capacity has fallen to less than half what it was in February 2022.
Lying in the cold the other night in my building’s basement shelter—no heat, no insulation—listening to the drones and missiles exploding outside, it suddenly occurred to me that things could get worse: a few more strikes, and the whole country might wake up to no electricity. But if Ukrainians are thinking that way, they don’t let on. “After everything that has happened since 2022,” one friend wrote to me the next day, “we don’t have the right to give up. There is nothing to do but stand strong and endure the trials.”
