KYIV—An air raid siren cuts through the city. One explosion echoes, then another. It is 2 a.m., and the temperature is minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
The blasts, muffled by thick layers of snow, sound distant, almost smothered, yet the night sky glows orange. On Telegram channels, alerts multiply: A ballistic missile is heading toward Kyiv. Another follows.
On the night of February 3, mere days after President Donald Trump said that Vladimir Putin had promised there would be no strikes for at least a week, Russia launched one of its most violent attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the start of the winter. Exploiting extreme cold and the harshest winter conditions since the war began, Moscow targeted power facilities across the country, firing more than 71 missiles of various types and over 450 strike drones.
Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said electricity generation facilities, as well as transmission and distribution networks, had been damaged in several oblasts. The situation, he said, was “complicated.” To reduce pressure on the grid, Ukrainian authorities, as in previous winters, have introduced rolling power cuts organized by neighborhood, and additional generators have been deployed to critical sites.
“Let’s be honest, it will take a considerable amount of time,” Shmyhal said about restoring power.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko called on residents to consider leaving the city temporarily in order to ease pressure on the energy system. Citing an estimated population of 3.5 million, he said that roughly 600,000 residents have already departed.
At the time of his appeal, more than 1,200 buildings in Kyiv lacked heating entirely.
Oleksandra Dmytrenko, who works for a charitable foundation supporting frontline combat medics, has decided to stay in Kyiv no matter what. The 33-year-old says that on some days she has electricity for only three hours, forcing her to organize her entire routine around blackout schedules.
“Even when the power goes out, I still have gas, so I can cook,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even have that.”
A Kyiv native, Dmytrenko uses the Kyiv Digital city app, where she has registered her apartment, her grandmother’s address, and her workplace. The app sends notifications when electricity is expected to be cut or restored, allowing her to plan where she can stay during outages.
The system helps, but it does not solve everything. Because of the extent of the damage to energy infrastructure, outages no longer always follow the schedule. Both her home and office are on upper floors, and the elevators stop working during blackouts. She stays pragmatic, sometimes joking that climbing stairs has become part of her daily workout.
Her main concern, however, is her grandmother, who is 86.
“What’s hardest for her is the loneliness and anxiety during blackouts,” Dmytrenko said. “She was a war child and is still afraid of loud noises.”
Dmytrenko equipped her grandmother with power banks and battery-powered lamps and installed the Kyiv Digital app on her phone so outages never come as a surprise.
Natalia Chekotun, a communications specialist with blond hair, bangs, a nose piercing, and oversized glasses, says that she organizes her days around electricity availability and carries essential equipment to endure long hours without power.
“Daily life becomes very logistical,” said Chekotun. “You’re constantly thinking about charging devices, when you can cook, when you can do laundry. When the power goes out, everything just stops.”
Weekends are affected as well.
“If there’s no electricity, I prefer not to stay home,” she said. “Sitting alone in a dark apartment feels depressing.”
With gray skies and darkness falling as early as 4 p.m., morale has grown increasingly fragile. Chekotun says Kyiv once stayed lively late into the night, but curfews and blackouts have transformed the city’s atmosphere.
“It obviously affects your morale,” she said.
Point of Invincibility.
Night falls early over Kyiv’s Left Bank. The sky hangs low and opaque, and January’s weak light dissolves into a dense haze. The cold bites. Everything is dark, not a single window is lit.
Between rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, silhouettes move silently, blankets tucked under their arms, bodies wrapped in heavy coats. People walk quickly. For two days, the electricity has been gone. With it, the heat. The hot water. Sometimes even running water itself.
Inside apartments, walls turn icy. Outside, though, in the middle of the darkness, a glow appears.
A long, military-style canvas tent, lit from within, casts orange reflections onto the surrounding gloom. Residents call it a “Point of Invincibility,” and Ukrainian authorities say they have established more than 10,000 sites across the country. These emergency shelters, powered by gasoline generators, offer people a few hours of warmth, light, and the chance to recharge a phone or drink a cup of hot tea.
Psychologists sit inside. So do medics and volunteers. A temporary island of light in a city repeatedly plunged into blackout.
Tatiana, 46, stands waiting, motionless, her gaze distant. She wears a long black coat, and the head of a small poodle peeks out from beneath the fabric.
“I live in that building right there,” she said. “It’s been two days without electricity. But the worst part is no heat and no running water. Yesterday it was 10 degrees inside the apartment. Today, 5.”
For Tatiana, the cold is the hardest part.
“For now, we adapt,” she said. “We sealed off several rooms. We all live in one bedroom. We sleep in big sleeping bags.”
Daily life reorganizes itself around outages.
“We eat when there’s gas. We shower as soon as the water comes back. We charge our batteries here, then we go home. We prepare for the next blackout.”
Stay or leave.
Inside the tent, a long table runs down the center. An EcoFlow battery powers a handful of outlets. One by one, residents step forward to plug in phones, flashlights, and chargers.
Some remain standing, shifting from foot to foot. Others sit briefly, hands wrapped around paper cups of tea. For many, it is their only chance to recharge before the next outage.
Two children, watched closely by their mother, Oleksandra Kovalenko, draw quietly and work on a puzzle. Kovalenko serves in the Ukrainian army and has just returned from the front. Her arm is in a cast. A volunteer hands her a cup of hot tea.
“I was injured recently in the Donbas,” she said.
Kovalenko is 32. Her husband also serves in the military, and her mother cares for their two children.
“When you come back from the front, you hope for a little comfort,” she said. “But that’s gone too. Our apartment is freezing.”
She says she is used to hardship. Her children are not.
“My son is 4, my daughter is 6,” she said. “They’re small. They really suffer. I can manage. But I worry most about them.”
For many Kyiv residents, the outages have revived a familiar wartime calculation: How long can you endure before you leave? Tatiana, for one, is considering leaving the city for a few days, until conditions improve.
“I have family in Zhytomyr,” she said, referring to a city west of Kyiv. “We could go there with my daughter and my husband.”
For now, she hesitates. The situation, she says, is not yet severe enough to abandon her neighborhood.
“At the moment, it’s two days without power, then it comes back,” she said. “We charge, we shower, we warm up. Then we wait for the next outage. But if it lasted an entire week, with no hope of return, then yes, we would leave.”
Kovalenko does not have that option.
“I don’t have anyone outside Kyiv,” she said. “And renting something in the west is too expensive. We just hope it will be resolved quickly. We don’t really have a choice.”