‘It’s simply a desire to destroy us’

Kyiv residents explain how they are surviving the cold as Russia weaponizes winter

After months of massive Russian strikes on power plants and distribution networks, residents of Ukrainian cities are freezing in their homes. Many have had little to no electricity or heating since the start of the year, and in some places, there’s no running water either. The hardest hit regions have been Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia, as well as Kyiv and the surrounding region. The capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, says around 600,000 people have left Kyiv in January alone, as temperatures plunged to -15° Celsius (5° Fahrenheit) — well below the seasonal norm. To learn how Ukrainians are surviving these extreme conditions, Meduza spoke to five residents of Kyiv and the surrounding region who chose to stay.

The following first-person accounts have been translated and abridged for length and clarity.

Maksym

Physics and astronomy teacher living in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district

Our building is brick, not prefab concrete, so we started off in a fairly good position [in terms of heat retention]. The building has been part of an energy-efficiency program for years. If we’re selected, the city covers part of the project [costs] and we’re able to improve the insulation. At one point, we replaced the wooden window frames in the stairwells with plastic ones and insulated the top and bottom floors. According to our neighbors, those measures are helping now.

Electricity is our biggest constraint. In previous years, my wife and I hardly thought about backup power: outages were short, and we managed. This winter, everything changed.

At first, we just needed some kind of lighting. You can’t get far with candles, oil lamps, or luchinas [miniature torches]. The most energy-efficient option now is LEDs, so LED strips became the backbone of our home lighting during outages. To save even more power, I equipped them with low-voltage motion sensors, so I don’t have to worry about whether I turned the lights off or drained the battery.

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At first, we powered the strips with a car battery that had already seen some use. But once we needed to run a laptop, the battery died. That’s when I looked into it more closely and learned that car batteries simply aren’t designed for this kind of use. On top of that, they take at least several hours to recharge. With our scheduled [blackouts], you might not manage to recharge in time and could end up high and dry at any moment.

So, we switched to a [portable] power station. It has greater capacity, charges faster, and — most importantly — everything is automated. We recently ordered one from Germany, and even with shipping, it cost about half as much as the same model in Ukraine — 524 euros [$628]. We don’t run the refrigerator or other high-power appliances off it, but we do charge computers and laptops. The battery setup with an inverter and charger had to be managed manually. Once we bought the power station, I finally felt some relief: I no longer have to constantly think about whether the battery is charged.

We use a different solution for the refrigerator. Before refrigerators existed, people harvested ice from rivers in winter, stored the blocks underground, and that gave them enough cold to last for months. Bottles of ice in the fridge work the same way to create a reserve of cold.

At the secondary school where I teach, the COVID lockdowns were our own kind of boot camp. We learned how to adapt to nonstandard external conditions. Unfortunately, schools in Ukraine still aren’t classified as critical infrastructure [and therefore don’t have uninterrupted power supply]. Buying generators for them is complicated too. I followed the situation in my district and saw that out of roughly 50 schools, generators were purchased for only two. And often it’s not a lack of funds — sometimes a tender is open, but there’s no supplier.

Until the winter break, classes continued in person, just in half-dark classrooms. Now, because of the cold and the significant damage to energy infrastructure, Kyiv has announced two additional weeks off. Other regions were told to decide for themselves whether to extend the break or continue classes.

You can’t really teach my subject without technology. Of course, you can teach the way people did 20 or 30 years ago, at a chalkboard. But I don’t want to go back to that era. I have presentations, videos, and other materials prepared for almost every lesson — things you can’t show on a chalkboard. So I stream the material from my device to the students’ smartphones or replace the projector with a single laptop for everyone. I gather the kids around and say: “In good times, we looked at a big screen. In not-so-good times, we look at the small screen of a laptop.”

Anna

Accessories brand owner living in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district, on the east bank of the Dnipro River

People here have coined a new word — Kholodomor— and it really does capture the reality of our lives. It feels a lot like the winter of 2022, when we also had prolonged blackouts, with electricity, heat, and water gone for hours on end. But that winter was warmer. Now we’re dealing with freezing temperatures, snow, and ice. In our neighborhood, even the electric trams have stopped running — at least the subway is still operating. Some buildings have electricity but no heat; others have heat but no electricity. That’s because [the energy companies] are deciding how best to distribute power.

Today, [January 20], we’ve been without electricity since about 9:30 in the morning. It’s 4:30 p.m. now — and that’s still considered a short outage. The water went out in the morning too and still hasn’t come back. We prepared in advance and stocked up on drinking and household water, filling several 19-liter [five-gallon] bottles. We ration it carefully, pouring some into basins so we can wash our faces or do the dishes.

Things took a turn for the worse around November, when the [scheduled rolling] outages — four hours on, four hours off — began. December was even worse, and the last two weeks of January have been downright brutal. We can be without electricity for 10 to 15 hours a day. All of last week, power in our building came on only at night, and only briefly.

The only real break was two days ago [January 18], when the electricity stayed on for a day and a half. We were stunned by such generosity. Of course, we boiled water, managed to wash properly, ran the washing machine, and did some basic cleaning. It felt like another, peaceful reality. But, unfortunately, the next round of strikes brought us right back to emergency blackouts.

We have an electric stove, so my husband and I bought a portable single-burner gas stove. On it, we can cook simple things, reheat food, and boil water to pour into thermoses so we can have tea later. That’s how we get by. Sometimes, when there’s no electricity, we buy prepared food from a deli or go eat at Puzata Hata. You can charge your phone there, too.

We have a battery and about six power banks of different capacities. We use them to power the router and the cats’ drinking fountain, charge our phones and tablets, and light up the kitchen — my husband stuck up an LED strip there. We also have USB-rechargeable lamps, battery-powered lamps, flashlights, and even a professional photo light that can illuminate an entire room. And I’ve arranged strings of holiday lights around the apartment: I put them into round vases made of thick, faceted glass, and the light plays off the edges. It actually works very well as lighting.

We’ve had to completely reorganize our daily routine. Before going to bed, I leave the light switch in the “on” position. Say the power comes back at one in the morning — you jump up. You have three or four hours to charge everything, boil water, fill the thermoses, take a proper shower, maybe cook something [on the electric stove], or at the very least boil some eggs. By morning, the power is gone again — and that’s how the whole day goes. Then, around midnight, it comes back on. It’s exhausting.

After nights like that, you don’t want to wake up early. Getting out of bed is hard, especially because it’s cold. Today the radiator is barely warm; the apartment is around 15° Celsius [59° Fahrenheit] on average. The large room is a bit warmer — about 16°C [61°F] — because it faces the sunny side and warms up in the morning. And it feels like such a blessing to have at least one room where you can go to warm up.

We live on the fifth floor of an 18-story prefab building. The heating comes from the top, so it’s warm — around 20°C [68°F] — on the upper floors. But the neighbors below are complaining: it’s 10°C [50°F] in their apartments, and in others it’s just 8°C [46°F]. And that’s with water-based heating. There are also buildings where the heating depends on electricity.

All of this has affected our business as well. Before the New Year, we had quite a lot of orders. Since January, sales have dropped — firstly because production can’t operate normally during outages, and secondly because people are spending their money on other things now, like batteries, thermoses, and power banks.

Yuliia

Fitness trainer living in Kyiv’s Shevchenkivskyi district

My husband, our daughter, and I spent a week without heating in our Khrushchev-era apartment — from January 9–16. [The utilities website] said it was an emergency shutdown and gave no further details. We have a gas stove, so we tried to keep warm by turning on one or two burners and leaving the oven door open. Before the shutdown, the temperature in our apartment was around 22–23°C [72–73°F]. During that week, we managed to keep it at about 15°C [59°F].

No one expected the outage to last that long. We thought we’d be without heat for a day or two at most. But every day, the utilities website posted a new update: first, “the outage will last until 10:00 a.m.,” then until 2:00 p.m., then until 6:00 in the evening, and so on. On January 14, the site said the damage had been repaired, but there was still no heat for another two days. It wasn’t just our building — many others in the neighborhood were in the same situation. During that period, nighttime temperatures outside dropped to -19°C [-2°F].

We’re not in the worst position, especially since our apartment isn’t a corner unit. I know that in many buildings on the east bank [of the Dnipro River], heating still hasn’t been restored [since the overnight attack on January 8–9]. In some places, pipes burst because the water in the heating system froze, which means they won’t have heat until spring. In my friend’s building in the Solomianskyi district, the heating pipes burst. We were also worried they’d shut off our heat and drain the water so the radiators wouldn’t burst — and that would be it. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

There are electricity outages too. Because of them, my child’s school vacation was extended, and now she spends her time with me at work.

Everyone is trying to hold on somehow, but very few people have the energy left for hobbies or simple pleasures. Before the war, there was an urge to try new things. Now that feeling is almost gone. All your strength goes into simply keeping life going.

Ihor

Educational course coordinator living in Kyiv’s Obolonskyi district

Compared with most people in Kyiv, we’re actually doing quite well right now — it’s about 19°C [66°F] in our apartment. Some friends of ours, former classmates who live in the Pecherskyi district, had to move in with us for three days because it was only 12°C [54°F] at their place. During the day they went off to work, and in the evenings we sat together, reminisced about our youth, drank wine, and joked, “When else would we have gotten together like this?” We were even glad to have an excuse to meet. Sitting there by the dim light of our [battery-powered] lamps felt so cozy that when the electricity came back on, it suddenly felt a bit uncomfortable.

A friend who stayed with us is now staying with another friend, in Vinnytsia. It turned out that all these outages left her with pneumonia in one lung.

Our heating has only been shut off twice — after the strike on the night of January 8 and again on the night of January 20. The temperature in the apartment dropped to about 17°C [63°F]. The radiators went from warm to not exactly cold — more like room temperature.

But last night [January 20], we did have electricity, and the boiler managed to heat 80 liters [21 gallons] of water. People who have centralized hot water generally have it easier. For example, our friends warm up by filling the bathtub, getting in, and then getting out and putting on warm clothes — and four hours later, they fill the tub again.

We have water. We have gas. What’s hardest is the lack of electricity: it comes on for about three hours, then disappears for the next 10 to 12. There have been days when we had electricity for just one hour out of a full 24.

Before the January strikes, my wife and I didn’t think much about the outages. The power cuts followed a schedule, so you could adapt. In winter, the balcony works as a refrigerator. You can heat water on the gas stove. We have a power bank we once bought for hiking trips — it was enough for work. The problems were barely noticeable; the rhythm of life just changed.

Today we were visiting friends, and they gave us a rechargeable light bulb — in case the outages get longer. We’re not planning to buy anything else, though. I don’t see a reason to complain. This is how things turned out; God gave us life in this time. It’s inconvenient, but this is the life we have right now.

Yes, we can’t do laundry very often, but once a week is enough. Yes, this morning I discovered we’d run out of ground coffee — but that’s fine. (I put the coffee grinder somewhere visible so I won’t forget to grind beans when the power comes back on.) I can also work from my phone. I’m still in touch with teachers and students — life goes on. And in the worst case, we have somewhere to escape to. So we wouldn’t have to spend the summer in dusty, stifling Kyiv, we bought a small house in a remote village in the Zhytomyr region. You can live self-sufficiently there, using firewood, candlelight, and water from the neighbor’s well.

I don’t think we should frame this as “we’re living in terrible conditions and surviving.” We’re not surviving — we’re living, just under different conditions. And there’s always something to be glad about. For instance, I’ve started reading much more. I have five books open at once on my e-reader, and I choose what to read based on my mood that day.

Recently I was browsing and came across Cursed Days by [Ivan] Bunin. It’s very on point: we’re living through cursed days ourselves. I started reading it and discovered that Bunin, in a similar situation, was himself reading about other cursed days — the French Revolution. When I realized that, I suddenly felt part of the flow of history.

I was interested in how a person feels during a critical period like this. In both myself and Bunin, I noticed two similar things: a strong negativity toward those who came to power, and a kind of inner stance — I don’t quite want to call it resolve — that keeps you from falling apart, from slipping into hysteria or depression. In a critical situation, the easiest thing to hold on to is your work. Bunin was writing then — and I’m writing my own book now.

Father Sviatoslav

Priest living in the Boryspil District in the Kyiv region

In our area, we have electricity for about three hours a day. At the end of last year, there were scheduled outage timetables across Ukraine. Now there are no schedules here at all — it’s all emergency outages. Before, you could prepare for them, plan your time, ration backup power. Now no one knows when the electricity will come on or how long it will last.

Sometimes, when the power does come back on, consumption [in the area] spikes immediately, the voltage drops, and you can get almost nothing done. Luckily, a [close family friend] who knows his way around electrical systems installed a power-limiting relay for us back at the start of the war. Without it, with the voltage surges we’re seeing now, our appliances would have burned out long ago.

We moved into the house we’re living in now as a family in the summer of 2023, after returning to Ukraine from evacuation. Here, literally everything depends on electricity: the heating boiler, the stove, the water pump, the refrigerator. We knew electricity would be a problem, so we prepared: we bought firewood for the boiler and took an old uninterruptible power supply [UPS] from my parents. It’s a lifesaver for us now.

At first, the system consisted of a 200-amp-hour gel battery and a UPS, and that was enough. Later, in 2024, we bought a second battery. With the current outages, even two batteries are no longer enough. On top of that, they don’t have time to fully recharge, so we had to buy a fast charger and figure out how to properly connect the two batteries, the charger, and the UPS. At first, I was constantly running around the system with a wrench. Then I asked ChatGPT how to automate it. Now we have a whole control panel: we can run on one battery, the other, or both at once — and even my 15-year-old son can handle the switching.

We also have a generator, which we bought in the fall of 2023 just in case. For the last two years, it just sat there. Now I don’t know what we’d do without it. There was a time when the word “generator” was associated only with a car part. Now, if you just say “generator,” everyone in Ukraine understands: it’s what you need to have electricity at home.

We’ve all become amateur power engineers. Our house has three different electrical phases and various power sources, all of which had to be combined into a single, coherent system. I spent a long time thinking it through, drawing diagrams of our “homestead wiring,” as my wife calls it. In the end, I installed an additional breaker panel, drilled holes so the generator cable could enter the house neatly, and wired everything so that when the power goes out, the system automatically switches to backup power. And we can choose which backup source to use. Now it takes a single click. Before, everything had to be done manually, and you constantly had to think about what you were turning on and where, so nothing would burn out.

While building this system, I really came to understand what controls what in our house. I made some changes and improvements myself — for example, distributing appliances by load and by phase so we can keep all the essential equipment running, including high-power devices like the pump, the boiler, and the stove. It gives you a sense of confidence and control: you know what can happen and what can’t, and if something does happen, you understand exactly what it is and how to fix it.

We try to run the generator as little as possible — it’s expensive. We even started keeping a usage log, which hangs on the wall in the boiler room. It helps us track fuel consumption. The tank holds 15 liters [four gallons], and that’s exactly how much gasoline I buy at a time. One full tank costs about 900 hryvnias [$21] and lasts roughly seven hours. With outages this severe, that’s enough for our family for two or three days at most [when using other backup sources as well]. It’s about three times more expensive than simply paying for electricity under normal conditions.

When outages become especially long and we have to conserve backup power, I impose a kind of “local blackout” and shut off everything I can in the house. Electricity is used only to keep the heating running, from a single battery. Then at four in the morning, I have to get up and check whether the power has come back. If it hasn’t, we run the boiler on the second battery to warm the house — otherwise, by morning, at -20°C [-4°F], it will be completely cold.

In Ukraine, Russian attacks are classified as crimes against humanity, and we completely agree with that definition. Putin would probably like for everyone here to leave or simply freeze to death. I see no other reason to bomb not the front lines, but civilian cities, and in the middle of winter at that. This has nothing to do with Russia’s interests. It’s simply a desire to destroy us.

We all seem to have entered some kind of emergency mode — at least I have. I hope it won’t last long. But our family is coping more easily [than many]. We’ve managed to preserve some sense of normal life — shared meals, prayer, the habit of reading before bed. For soldiers at the front, or people living near the front line, it’s far more difficult.

Because of the war, there’s a sense of hopelessness. You keep trying and trying, but the future is unclear. I feel a deep loss of energy. Everything I used to do — teaching, for example — now feels pointless. And physically, there’s no time or strength for it: everything goes towards the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. You’re constantly thinking about your batteries, whether you can buy another canister of gasoline… Ordinary human life fades into the fog, into a distant peaceful life that may or may not return. Still, we believe it will.

Interviews by Iryna Olehova