President Putin is driving Kyiv towards a “humanitarian catastrophe”, Vitali Klitschko, the Ukrainian capital’s mayor, has warned after massive overnight Russian strikes cut power, heating and water to half the city.
He advised residents to “leave if they can” as emergency crews scrambled to restore power to a snow-coated Kyiv.
Temperatures have fallen as low as minus 18C during a cold snap projected to last at least two more weeks. This month 600,000 people have already fled the capital, home to more than 3 million, Klitschko said.
“The situation is critical with basic services — heating, water, electricity. Right now, 5,600 apartment buildings are without heating,” Klitschko told The Times. Unable to keep it at the right temperature, the authorities had been forced to drain Kyiv’s large centralised heating and water system to prevent water turning to ice and bursting pipes as it expands, he added.
The capital had been struggling with rolling blackouts and minimal heating since an earlier Russian attack on January 9, timed for the start of the coldest winter period in more than a decade. Then, in the early hours of Tuesday, Kremlin forces launched some 470 drones, 47 cruise missiles and one ballistic missile at Ukraine. The attack reversed repairs to the energy grid carried out since the earlier strike.
• Freezing cold and under attack: daily life in my Kyiv flat
In both instances Russian ballistic missiles hit a thermal power plant in Kyiv, Klitschko said. “The Russians want to make a humanitarian catastrophe in our hometown, to make people freeze during the winter,” he said.
ANTON SHTUKA FOR THE TIMES
Some homes are so cold the residents cannot use the lavatory because the water has frozen in the bowl, and icicles have formed from condensation on the window sill.
Anastasia, 34, is trying to look after her children Yevhen, six, and Anya, four, at home since schools and nurseries have not been able to reopen since the January 9 attack.
Anastasia, 34, with Hanna, four
“They said holidays are extended until February 1 because in the kindergarten there’s no electricity, so they sit there freezing,” she said. “At school it’s the same. But we also haven’t had heating for two weeks. We have a gas hob in the kitchen, but the children’s bedrooms are completely icy.”
President Zelensky said last week that key western-supplied air defence systems had run out of ammunition due to reduced support from allies, allowing the Russians to overwhelm defences with a combination of massed missiles and drones. Large swathes of Kharkiv and Odesa were also without heating and electricity on Tuesday after the Russians targeted their energy infrastructure too.
In the capital, Zelensky has sought to blame Klitschko for the city’s prolonged outages, saying it was less prepared than Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, which is 12 miles from the Russian border.
Klitschko snapped back, saying it was “not smart” of the president to create political conflict inside the country at a time when it needed to be united. Speaking from Kyiv’s city hall, where staff have been barred from the lavatories because there was no running water, he said Zelensky had refused his requests for a meeting to discuss the crisis, although electricity generation and air defence is the central government’s responsibility.
Residents try to keep warm
Subway stations are the warmest place for some
DANYLO ANTONIUK/AP
Experts say that if the sewage system is not restored quickly, along with running water, disease is likely to spread and the city will start to shut down.
“Water is the key. If the Russians continue to prevent the supply of water to such a huge city, it creates the risk of a complete collapse,” said Taras Zahorodniy, head of the National Anti-Crisis Group. “People can’t wash, cook or clean.”
The building that houses the parliamentary committee for energy was also without power, heating and water on Tuesday. Yaroslav Zheleznyak, an opposition MP, said both Zelensky and Klitschko had failed to prepare for the situation. “They need to stop wasting time pointing fingers at each other and get external help and aid for decentralised power generation,” he said.
• Russian blitz on Kyiv leaves more than 500,000 without power
“But my first question is to Zelensky, especially after all these corruption scandals. We have five or six situation rooms for preparing for a Russian attack. We have for the last four years a military administration in the city connected with the president and the largest municipal budget in the country. And I’m sitting here in the cold.”
Klitschko pointed to his office’s provision of heated tents and train carriages as evidence of efforts to prepare Kyiv’s citizens for the worst.
Kyiv battles sub-zero temperatures as bombing continues
The Times visited a “train of invulnerability”, heated by coal and powered by generators, where we found children whiling away the hours.
“There’s no electricity at home and it’s cold. So we come here because you can warm up, drink tea, drink water. We’ve already been coming every day for five days,” said Bohdan, 11. “Our school’s generator has broken down and they say we won’t come back until February.”
Bohdan, 11
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In another compartment, Valentyna, a 36-year-old doctor, was charging a large portable battery she bought in the first winter of the war, the last time the capital experienced such outages.
“I came to recharge it, because we use it for our electric boiler and there is no heating at home,” she said. “My shift ended two hours ago. We were without electricity, without computers, just examining patients in the daylight. But we can’t refer them to specialists, because our computer systems are down.”
Across the capital, businesses that had considered themselves well-prepared for short blackouts have found themselves in difficulties as the power shortage drags on.
Out of charge
ANTON SHTUKA FOR THE TIMES
The city’s café and restaurant generators are beginning to break down as a result of near constant use and in some cases fuel supplies are running low.
Yet Kyivans refuse to be bowed. In one trendy restaurant, bar staff served cocktails made with light from their iPhone torches to customers enjoying candlelit dinners made on gas cookers.
In new-build complexes, where all cooking appliances are electric, residents are braving ice and snow to gather outside for barbecues, meeting their neighbours for the first time and dancing together to keep warm in the firelight. “There are apartments in our building where it is only three or five degrees, and mums, families with children, they can’t live in there. Some go to relatives or parents in villages. But here there are a lot of young people, so we enjoy a party,” said Alex, 38.
Eva, 26, the party’s organiser, said she had been inspired by other neighbourhoods posting online about similar events. “We want a little distraction, and we want to show that Ukrainian spirit is unbreakable.”
Additional reporting by Artem Lysak