KYIV -- Electricity for a few hours daily at best. Apartments without heat for days. Power generators whirring on snowy sidewalks. On-and-off running water in homes. The coldest temperatures in years.
Nerves are fraying, patience is thinning, and Kyiv is freezing as Ukrainians struggle to cope with relentless Russian attacks that have destroyed vast parts of the country's energy infrastructure. One week after an especially large Russian barrage on January 9, many homes in the capital remain without heat or other utilities.
While Russia's bombardment of civilian energy and heating targets is far from a new strategy, this winter's barrage feels more relentless and punishing than past year.
"It's 15 degrees (Celsius) in my apartment," one woman said while walking on a Kyiv street not far from her apartment building.
"I dress warmly and I tell [Mayor Vitali] Klitschko to hurry up. Of course, I can't hurry myself, given my age. I drink a lot of hot tea."
Temperatures in Kyiv and across Ukraine have been unusually low this winter.
"It's all a pity that we weren't more prepared for this," she said in an interview with Current Time.
Another man, trundling through central Kyiv, said his home lost heat for three days, during which time his wife turned on all the burners on their gas stove: "Thank God we had gas."
Ukrainians are exhausted from nearly four years of Russia's all-out assault on their country. For many, morale has waxed and waned as the Ukrainian military's battlefield fortunes have twisted and turned.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other elected officials have tried to keep Ukrainians' spirits up -- while also keeping up Western allied support and a steady flow of Western weaponry that has powered the military's fight. That includes air defenses to shoot down incoming missiles and drones.
SEE ALSO: 'General Armageddon': Who Is The Brutal Russian Commander Charged With Winning The Ukraine War?This winter, Russia has made no secret that its strategy is to target Ukraine's already-battered electricity grid and power plant facilities, along with municipal heating plants, which supply heat and hot water to many, if not most, buildings in Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns and cities.
"There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that has not been hit by the Russians during the war," Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal told lawmakers on January 16.
But Ukraine has only a limited number of anti-aircraft defense to shoot down drones and missiles. Officials have imposed rolling outages through the city and surrounding regions -- for example, three hours of power per 12-hour period -- as utility workers scramble to repair the damage and keep the lights and heat on.
"There is a lot of damage," a worker from DTEK, Ukraine's largest private utility company, said in a video it released. "Broken wires, broken insulators, broken poles. Fields, clearings, roads swept away, where no equipment can reach. To find the breaks, the guys walk for hours in the cold."
Ukrainians are getting impatient and are starting to lash out at local and national officials. Particularly in Kyiv.
"Kyiv, unfortunately, has done much less; very little has been done in the capital. And even these days I don't see much intensity," Zelenskyy said, acknowledging the struggle workers have had in keeping homes warm and lit.
That prompted a sharp retort from Kyiv's mayor, who has feuded with Zelenskyy in the past.
"What 'intensity' does the president not see in the work in Kyiv, in this crisis situation, in recent days in particular, as he said?" Klitschko said in a post to Telegram on January 14.
"At least I'm speaking honestly and warning people about an extremely difficult situation. And I don't care about any ratings or phantom elections," said Klitschko, who had advised Kyiv residents to leave the city amid the energy crisis and find shelter with relatives or friends elsewhere.
Emergency officials have set up inflatable heating tents in Kyiv's worst-affected neighborhoods where people can warm up and charge their phones and computers.
Volunteers have set up makeshift stoves in public parks for people to cook food on.
Inna, a mother of three, including a 3-week-old, said her family made it through the first night after heat and power were knocked out. By the second, however, the inside temperature had dropped to 15 degrees, and they started to suffer in the cold.
"We dressed the youngest in two onesies and a warm sweater. A neighbor brought over a wool sweater from the 1940s," she said. "And I grabbed a fur from the maternity hospital, which I also put on him.
"I haven't had power for around 55 hours already, so I just laugh to to keep from crying," said Anna, a woman playing cards at another warming center.
"We want negotiations. But it seems to me Russia doesn't want any negotiations. And what's next? I don't know," said yet another exhausted woman at the center. "I want to live in Ukraine."
Laws Of Armed Conflict
The decision to target Ukraine's civilian population began in earnest several months after the start of the invasion in February 2022.
Since then, a growing number of international legal experts have concluded that the effort is a clear war crime, a violation of international humanitarian law prohibiting the deliberate targeting of civilians.
Residents walk on a snow-covered street in Kyiv, where power and heating infrastructure have been badly damaged by Russian attacks, on January 15.
"These attacks are timed not to coincide with military offensives but with the onset of winter. The foreseeable effect -- and arguably the intent -- is to plunge civilians into darkness and deprivation, using winter as a weapon," one group of lawyers wrote in a paper published in November.
"The scale of civilian suffering caused by these strikes far exceeds any conceivable military advantage, violating the rule of proportionality," the said. "And the deliberate use of cold and darkness to break morale indicates an intent to terrorize, which is explicitly prohibited under the laws of war."
People warm themselves in an emergency shelter tent in Kyiv on January 13.
In March 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two top Russian military officers -- a Black Sea naval admiral an air force general -- for orchestrating the campaign to target civilian targets.
"We're freezing cold, but what are you going to do?" another woman, who lives in a district on the eastern banks of the Dnieper River, said as she walked in central Kyiv.
She told Current Time she had been without heat for four days and that she stays warm "with blankets, clothes, and tea, but we don't have any cooking gas."
"Can't you do anything for us, sir?" she said, appealing to the government.