‘We must get through the next few days’: Ukrainians face bitter cold without power

By Tim Lister, Kosta Gak, CNN

(CNN) — Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Ukraine face several days of extreme cold with very little heat and light, after sustained Russian drone and missile attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure.

In the capital, Kyiv, temperatures well below zero and bitterly cold winds are expected for the next four days at least.

“We must get through the next few days, which will be very difficult for Kyiv,” the city’s mayor, Vitaliy Klitschko, said Sunday. “Severe frosts are again forecast in the capital, especially at night,” he said on Telegram.

Klitschko said Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was in “an extremely difficult situation” and that he had issued instructions for communal “heating points,” powered by generators, to be fully functional. Some of these shelters allow people to stay overnight.

According to the energy ministry, residents of the capital are receiving electricity only for one and a half to two hours a day.

During a Russian strike in early January, one Kyiv resident who lived in an apartment at the top of a 16–story building at the time said he and his wife had lost heating, power and water.

The next Russian strike hit the power plant providing heat to the apartment block, as well as 1,100 other buildings in the capital, and he said about half of the residents had moved out of the building, including his family.

The average temperature in the apartment had fallen to just 3 degrees Celsius (37.4 degrees Fahrenheit), he added.

Residents were told that repairs could take two months – during the coldest part of the year.

Businesses also suffer. The Backstage Beauty Salon network says it invested $400,000 in back-up systems, including generators, fuel and batteries. But a drone had hit one of its salons, shattering a heating pipe and flooding the premises.

“Despite all this spending, weather conditions and Russian attacks prevail over the system,” the company posted on Instagram Saturday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram Sunday: “Almost every day, the (Russians) strike energy facilities, logistics infrastructure, and residential buildings… Over 2,000 strike drones, 1,200 guided aerial bombs, and 116 missiles of various types were launched by Russia at our cities and villages this week alone.”

Ukrenergo, the national grid company, said Sunday that it continued dealing with the aftermath of two massive missile and drone attacks on the power grid this week.

“The level of power shortages and damage to the electricity transmission and distribution networks currently prevents the lifting of emergency blackouts in most regions,” but repair work had made power cuts less severe in some regions, it said.

“Restoration work is continuing at both power plants and high-voltage substations that supply power to nuclear power plants.”

Another Ukrainian power operator, DTEK, said Saturday that damage to high-voltage substations had caused a reduction in output at nuclear power plants, leading to a significant loss of available electricity.

The latest Russian strikes followed a short-lived moratorium on attacks by each side on the other’s energy infrastructure, agreed at the urging of the United States.

Zelensky said Saturday that Washington had proposed “that both sides once again support the US President’s energy de-escalation initiative. Ukraine has agreed, but Russia has not yet responded.”

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Saturday: “The fact that Russia conducted two sets of strikes with over 400 projectiles within six days of the lapse of the energy strikes moratorium demonstrates the Kremlin’s determination to maximize the suffering of Ukrainian civilians and unwillingness to de-escalate the war or seriously advance the US-initiated peace negotiations.”

“Russian forces have also modified their drones and missiles to inflict more damage, including by equipping Shahed drones with mines and cluster munitions, and such measures have disproportionately affected civilian and energy infrastructure,” the institute added.

The consequences of Russian strikes are aggravated in many urban areas by reliance on centralized heating systems, a legacy of the Soviet era. Heat is generated at thermal or combined heat and power plants before being distributed, so if such facilities are targeted many residential blocks are impacted.

The destruction of central heating pipes can affect an entire neighborhood. When temperatures drop below freezing, a long power outage can lead underground heating pipes to fracture if the water inside them freezes.

Some analysts have noted that Russia’s war planners try to take advantage of this vulnerability in their targeting.

“I think the Russian military is being advised by their energy specialists and they are explaining how to cause maximum damage to the energy system,” DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko said in 2022.

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