Russian strikes targeting energy infrastructure are causing unprecedented hardship to some of Ukraine's most vulnerable creatures amid the harshest winter since the 2022 invasion.
Animal welfare veterans say stray dogs and cats are dying on the street from the cold, as well as an unexpected side effect of the country's power crisis.
Lionel De Lange told RFE/RL, "The big issue now is not only are the animals freezing out there, they also don't have access to drinking water because all their water is freezing. It's a huge problem." The South African founder of the WOW Ukraine Animal Shelter has lived in Ukraine since 2010 and runs a team feeding strays in the Kherson region.
In previous winters when power for heating was available, De Lange says, "there were always places where you could put food down so that it didn't freeze and that water didn't freeze. But now there's just nothing available."
Additionally, spaces beneath buildings where stray animals once crawled to nestle alongside pipes warmed by central heating are now lethally cold, leaving many animals with nowhere to turn.
The Kremlin has weaponized winters by targeting Ukraine's energy network through much of the war, but strikes in recent weeks have been brutally effective in crippling heating infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of households in Kyiv alone have endured long power outages in recent days as temperatures have dipped far below freezing across much of Ukraine. The 2025-2026 winter is one of the harshest in decades.
In some areas of Ukraine, local authorities are enacting measures to keep stray animals alive. Lviv's City Council announced on January 16 that municipal buildings in the city will open their doors to dogs and cats seeking shelter. Elsewhere, locals and charity organizations have built hay-stuffed shelters for animals.
In Novomyrhorod in central Ukraine, Yulia Baranovska says the situation for strays is now "absolutely critical." The young woman captured the attention of many outside Ukraine with a January 21 video showing her rescuing an elderly dog that had apparently been abandoned. "For three days the animal was out in the frost," she told RFE/RL, adding that locals "just passed him by."
Baranovska is currently housing more than 120 dogs and cats and is in the process of building her own shelter.
For many animals, human help never arrived. Distressing images from recent days show strays that succumbed to the wartime winter. Such cases have become increasingly common in areas near the front lines of the current conflict, where the few people who remain are struggling to survive themselves.
In Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, dog shelter owner Maryna Bolokhovets says in her packed facilities, the dogs sense the seriousness of the situation. With the shelter receiving electricity for just a few hours each day, the dogs "eat [double portions]" she wrote in a recent social media post, adding that in the usually raucous spaces housing her dogs, now, "they don't fight."
Lionel De Lange says for those wanting to help, the most effective thing they can do is reach out to their local shelters and look into donating heaters that don't rely on electricity.
"You can buy a nice wood-burning stove that could possibly keep 20 or 30 dogs warm that are living in a frozen room. That's about the only real way to help," he says. "That or just stop the Russians."
