As a war correspondent, I have seen this strategy before. Putin is weaponising the savage eastern European winter. In the winter of 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, people burned books and furniture to keep warm. Water froze in pipes. Electricity vanished for the duration of the war. Children slept in coats and hats, their breath visible in dark rooms. Cold itself became a weapon of war.
Three decades later, I am watching another winter war – this time in Ukraine. It is a human-made catastrophe. Russia is now systematically targeting the country’s energy infrastructure. Since last mid-autumn, attacks on power and heating systems across eastern, central and southern Ukraine – including Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv – have forced daily electricity outages. Until December, power cuts followed a grim rhythm: four hours on, four hours off, all day and night.
According to Ukraine’s minister of economy, Oleksii Sobolev, the total damage to its energy infrastructure from these attacks over the past three months will cost an estimated $1bn to address. But no statistic can capture what it means to live in a city where winter has been deliberately turned into a tool of terror. On 9 January 2026, a massive strike on Kyiv’s energy grid left 6,000 residential buildings – about half of the city’s housing supply – without heating. On 20 January, another attack cut power from more than 5,600 buildings, many of them the same ones. On 24 January, the same neighbourhoods were hit again: 6,000 buildings lost heating, with 3,200 buildings still without as night fell.
This is happening as temperatures in Kyiv fall to between –15C and –18C, dropping to –20C at night. Inside apartments, people heat bricks on gas stoves and use them as makeshift radiators. Families pitch hiking tents in their living rooms, sheltering inside them in thermal clothes and sleeping bags. Schools in Kyiv have extended holidays until February; elsewhere, children are back online because classrooms are too cold. One of the cruellest stories from the winter cold is that of military veterans with bionic prosthetics. Without electricity, they cannot recharge their limbs.
Ukrainians have begun calling this reality “kholodomor” – death by cold – an echo of Holodomor, the human-made famine Stalin used to crush Ukraine in the 1930s. Then, hunger was the weapon. Now, it is winter. Amid this suffering engineered by Vladimir Putin, something extraordinary persists. People keep going, refusing to be broken by Moscow. Supermarkets now allow stray dogs and cats inside to keep warm; young people organise generator-powered raves in courtyards, dancing in the dark as an act of defiance.
