Ukraine's Dog Winter: Grid Collapse, Russian Barrages, Hot Street Meals, Bitter Cold

KYIV -- It’s so cold In Darya’s apartment that the dog has taken to sleeping with her. And she heats up a construction brick in her gas cooking stove.

“At home, I have to wear and sleep in warm clothes: army thermals, two pairs of trekking socks, a blanket. Carpathian blankets, warm tea,” she said, referring to the famed heavy blankets made in western Ukraine’s mountains. "My dog moved in with me under the blanket because it’s warm."

This winter has been miserable for millions of Ukrainians suffering at the hands of unprecedented energy blackouts caused by relentless, and targeted, Russian drone and missile strikes that have severely damaged heating and electricity infrastructure across the country.

Since at least January 9, which saw the worst Russian barrage of the New Year, emergency crews have raced to keep pace with the destruction wrought by Russian attacks. Substations damaged. Power-line pylons toppled. Heating and hot water pipes ruptured. Plants shut down.

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With nighttime temperatures dipping below minus 13 degrees Celsius on January 20, more than 1 million people were plunged into darkness, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, after the latest barrage of nearly 300 drones and missiles. A day later, nearly 60 percent of the capital was still without power.

“This is a serious winter,” one utility worker who was working with a crew to dig up frozen soil outside a building in Kyiv. "This is a real winter. It's very difficult to break through the ground, through the asphalt, through everything -- it’s much more difficult.”

Dogs in bed are one way of coping. So are bricks used in construction, which people like Darya warm up in their gas-fired cooking stoves and then put out on a table where they emit heat for some time, even when the power goes out.

'Just Impossible'

Darya, who declined to give her last name, said her home was without heat for a week before electricity and heat were restored. Then they went out again. It was 2 degrees Celsius inside the apartment the previous day.

“The first days were just impossible here,” she told Current Time, as she then addressed her growling dog. “I totally agree with you. I also didn’t like it.”

Much of Kyiv’s “left bank” district -- on the eastern side of the Dnieper River -- was without power or water on January 20, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

This year's winter in Kyiv is one of the coldest in years.

Around the city, municipal authorities have set up emergency heating tents, which glow an eerie red in the darkened courtyards after dark. In daylight hours, volunteers from World Central Kitchen, the Washington-based international food-relief organization, handed out beef-and-potato soup to people lined up.

"We live in a high-rise building and there's no power. If there's no power, the stoves don't work and there's no heating. And how can you heat up your food when there's no power?” said Valentyna Kiryakova, a retiree, as she waited in line for a hot meal to bring home to her 6-year-old granddaughter.

“But it's OK, we're surviving. It's OK, we're not complaining -- we're surviving. And we understand that there's a war going on: we have to endure, we have to survive,” she said.

Block Parties, Street Barbecues In Kyiv As Russia Targets Energy Grid

Also standing in line for a hot meal was Katya Prokopenko, who said the lack of electricity meant there was no way to cook food on her electric stove.

“The children go to kindergarten, and thank God, they get food there. And when it's the weekend, well, here we are,” she said, smiling at the food line.

'I Don't Know What To Do'

Other than kindergartens, however, schools across the Ukrainian capital have been ordered closed until February. Municipal officials have also ordered city streetlights dimmed to conserve electricity.

Kyiv is not the only place that has suffered. Russian strikes killed three people and knocked power in parts of the Zaporizhzhya region, which is bisected by the front line. In the north, the power grid supplying the remnants of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was also hit, endangering some of the emergency systems that keep the defunct facility from catching fire or emitting new radiation.

The heat went out in the first-floor Kyiv apartment of Tetyana, an elderly pensioner, on January 10. In the rooms that face the sun, indoor temperatures hovered around 5 degrees Celsius; in the non-sunny rooms, around 2-3 degrees.

Kyiv's power grid has been badly damaged by Russian strikes this winter, plunging the Ukrainian capital into frequent blackouts.

“Right now, we don’t have anything, including water, so it’s really cold, and we have to wear winter clothes inside,” she said as she showed RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service around the apartment. Outside, air raid sirens wailed. Inside, a thermometer showed 1 degree. “I feel like a cabbage.”

Tetyana and her husband, who recently underwent heart surgery, had propped pillows up along the windowsills to try and keep the cold out, and three electric radiators stood cold, due to the lack of electricity.

The previous day, she and her husband gave up trying to remain at home and asked relatives if they could stay over for a night.

“We’ll have to look at other options,” she said. “I really don’t know what to do at all.”

'Just Impossible'

'I Don't Know What To Do'

With reporting by Current Time correspondent Igor Shevchuk