Natalya Pavlovna watched her two-year-old son, Danylo, play with Lego inside a warm tent in Kyiv's Troieshchina district. Outside, temperatures plunged to -18C. The emergency facility, donated by Unicef, offers respite for residents enduring one of the coldest winters in decades as Russia's relentless bombing of Ukraine's energy infrastructure leaves thousands without power or heating.
'Russia is trying to break us. It's deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian people,' said Natalya, whose apartment is among 2,600 buildings in the capital currently without electricity or heating. The Kremlin has targeted substations, thermal power plants and rescue workers since the start of its full-scale invasion nearly four years ago. Recent ballistic missiles flattened the Darnytska combined heat and power plant, which supplied much of the left bank of the Dnipro River.
Frequent capital-wide blackouts restrict electricity supply to three or four hours a day. Toby Fricker, a Unicef spokesperson, noted the massive impact on families: 45% of schools in Kyiv are closed due to lack of central heating. 'Kids and teenagers experience social isolation. They are missing out on normal life,' he said.
Residents have resorted to ingenious hacks to stay warm. Some heat bricks and rocks over gas stoves; others erect tents inside living rooms. Julia Po, an artist from Russian-occupied Crimea, showed her seventh-floor home in Kyiv's Dniprovskyi neighbourhood. With no electricity, the lift does not work; frozen water pipes burst two weeks ago. She sleeps under two blankets, wearing thermal underwear and a hoodie. 'When you wake up in the morning you can feel your kidneys,' she said.
Natalya compared the crisis to the 1932-33 famine engineered by Stalin, known as Holodomor. 'Putin wants to do to Kyiv what he did to Mariupol,' she said, adding that many residents had fled fighting elsewhere. Some mothers have swapped tips about cheap accommodation abroad, while others like Yuliia, a mother of six-year-old twins, have decided to stay. 'We don't know how long this situation will last. It's cold. We sleep in our hats,' she said.
