‘Regular life has disappeared’: Russia’s power offensive plunges Ukraine into darkish and bitter chilly

LONDON — The cacophony of war has become familiar to the residents of Ukraine’s major cities after nearly four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Each night brings the beep of air raid alerts from smartphones. Later comes the low buzz of Russian attack drones, the crackle and thud of machine gun fire from mobile defense teams, the tearing whistle of Moscow’s ballistic missiles and the roar of interceptors fired to meet them.

This winter, the citywide hum of thousands of generators has dominated the soundtrack — a “modern symphony,” as Ivan Stupak, a former officer in the Security Service of Ukraine, described it to ABC News from Kyiv — as Ukraine withers Moscow’s attempt to collapse the national energy grid.

Major cities are now regularly thrust into darkness by rolling blackouts affecting hundreds of thousands — sometimes even millions — of people, amid heavy snow and temperatures well below freezing.

Ed Ivashchuk — originally from the occupied eastern city of Melitopol and now living in Kyiv’s southeastern Darnytskyi district — said it is “a horrible feeling to go to bed wearing warm clothes, covered with several blankets, and still feel cold.”

“You wake up in the morning with pain in your lungs, as if pneumonia is starting,” Ivashchuk said in an interview facilitated by the Hope for Ukraine NGO.

Russia has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure during each winter of its full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022. But this winter’s campaign has proved larger, more sustained and more effective, according to Ukrainian officials.

“Now their strategy is more aggressive and precise,” Stupak said.

Such is the strain on the capital’s energy grid that Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged residents on Jan. 9 to temporarily leave the city if they could. The mayor later said that some 600,000 people subsequently departed — around 20% of Kyiv’s official pre-war population of just under 3 million people.

Ukrainian emergency repair teams are working under fire and around the clock, but rolling blackouts amid bitter cold are the new reality for Ukrainians across the country. On Jan. 24, for example, Ukrainian officials said overnight Russian strikes left an estimated 2.5 million people without power.

Maxim Timchenko, the CEO of DTEK — Ukraine’s top private energy firm — told Reuters on Jan. 23 that the national situation was “close to a humanitarian catastrophe.”

The Kremlin confirmed that President Donald Trump made a personal request to Russian President Vladimir Putin to refrain from striking Kyiv until this Sunday, “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”

Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov later said Russia had agreed to pause the attacks on the capital until Sunday, though did not say whether the agreement extended to other parts of the country.

Ukrainians in Kyiv and elsewhere told ABC News that this winter has been the hardest of the war.

Power outages and fluctuations deny Ukrainians hot water, damage or negate electric stoves and other appliances, cut internet access and force residents to light their homes with candles.

In the capital’s eastern Dniprovskyi district, Nastia Sherstiuk — who was also displaced from Melitopol — said Russia’s strikes “exploit” the coldest nights.

The outages, Sherstiuk said, result in a host of additional dangers. “There were cases of people heating their homes with gas stoves and dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, most often elderly people,” she said. A whole family, Sherstiuk said, were fatally poisoned by a generator they installed on their balcony.

“Does it undermine morale? It does not break our will to resist, but it exhausts it — slowly, systematically and deeply,” she added. “That is likely exactly what the enemy is counting on.”

Freezing under fire

January saw Russia launch 4,577 long-range drones and missiles into Ukraine, according to data published by Ukraine’s air force. Defenders downed or suppressed around 83% of the drones and 51% of the missiles, the air force said.

Some of January’s largest strikes coincided with its coldest nights. On the night of Jan. 19, for example, Russia launched 373 munitions into Ukraine while temperatures were as low as 14 F in Odessa, 12 F in Kyiv and Kharkiv, just under 9 F in Kryvyi Rih and around 1 F in Lviv.

Ukraine’s military, meanwhile, is also waging its own long-range strike campaign into Russia. Among its targets have been energy — particularly oil — production, refining and transport facilities, as well as power plants.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down 3,676 Ukrainian drones during January.

Neither side provides detailed data on the scale of their own attacks or their targets. ABC News cannot independently verify the data released by either Russia or Ukraine.

Russia’s Defense Ministry generally describes its largest barrages as attacks on “Ukrainian military industry enterprises, energy and transport infrastructure facilities” used by the Ukrainian military, plus other military supply and personnel sites.

Ukrainian officials say Moscow is intentionally targeting civilian energy infrastructure in a bid to freeze the country into submission.

“Russia’s main targets right now are our energy sector, critical infrastructure and residential buildings,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media last month. “Every massive attack by Russia can become devastating.”

“Everyone sees how Russia tries to freeze Ukrainians — our people — to death at -20c,” or about -4 F, Zelenskyy wrote on social media last week. Citing the strain on the national grid, the president declared a state of emergency on Jan. 14.

The civilian death toll has been edging upward as the war grinds on. The United Nations’ Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in January that 2025 was the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since 2022.

“A massive increase in the use of long-range weapons by the Russian armed forces” helped drive the trend, the mission said.

Drones and missiles inflicted 35% of all civilian casualties in Ukraine through 2025 — with 682 people killed and 4,443 people injured — the mission added. That represented a 65% increase in casualties versus 2024, based on the mission’s numbers.

‘Normal life has disappeared’

Those who spoke with ABC News described a mental and physical war of attrition against dual adversaries — Russia and winter.

Generators have become vital, with their emergency power helping to plug the gaps wrought in the grid by relentless aerial attacks. European nations have mobilized to send hundreds of generators to Ukraine in recent weeks to help power key facilities like hospitals and shelters.

Western partners are also sending new equipment, spare parts and funds to support the repair of infrastructure destroyed or damaged by Russian strikes. Lithuania even shipped the components of an entire thermal power plant — capable, the European Commission said, of providing power for 1 million people — to Ukraine.

So-called “invincibility points” have also sprung up in cities across the country where people can shelter from the cold, charge devices and receive support. There are now some 10,600 points in operation, according to Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.

The U.S.-based Nova Ukraine NGO is among the organizations supplementing state-run “invincibility points.”

“It may sound very basic, but when it is around -18C outside and there is no heating in your apartment, the ability to come somewhere, drink a cup of hot tea and warm up can become — quite literally — a matter of survival,” Olena Drozd, Nova Ukraine’s infrastructure lead, told ABC News.

Months of intermittent electricity have forced Ukrainians to adapt. “Of course, the lack of light causes some discomfort, but it is not the worst thing in life,” 34-year-old Kateryna Haiduk from Kryvyi Rih, in the center of the country, told ABC News. “It is surprising when the schedule says that the light will be turned off, but it is not turned off.”

Viktoria Bondarenko, 32, also from Kryvyi Rih, said her life “has narrowed to very basic things: where to charge my phone, how to stay warm, how to plan my day around power outages. It feels like I’m constantly on standby.”

“The hardest part isn’t any one specific moment, but the feeling that normal life has disappeared,” she said. “You can’t just come home and warm up, turn on the lights, and relax. Even at home, you continue to survive.”

Maksim Anishchenko, who was displaced with his family from the eastern port city of Mariupol — now occupied by Russia — to Kryvyi Rih, said he was “surprised at how I learned to survive almost automatically — my body and mind are looking for a way out, but emotionally it is still very difficult.” 

The strain of long outages, he said, is wearing on his entire family. “You live in a constant state of waiting. At such moments, you begin to appreciate even small moments of light and warmth, because they already seem like a luxury,” he said.

Natalia Lukashuk, who also lives in Kryvyi Rih, said that “without light, any little thing takes many times more strength. You are constantly balancing between ‘I have to’ and ‘I can’t anymore.'”

Among the most vulnerable are the elderly. Iryna Mykhailivna, 83, said the elevators in her Kryvyi Rih apartment building now rarely work, largely confining her to her home. When cell phone connection also drops out, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to contact my relatives or call an ambulance,” she said.

Halyna Natiatullina, another pensioner who was displaced from her home and now lives in Kryvyi Rih said, “There used to be a house where I could warm up and hide, but now I don’t have that feeling. My personal life has come down to simply waiting for the day to pass peacefully, without anxiety and bad news.”

Many of those interviewed acknowledged that conditions are far worse at the front, where Ukrainian troops are battling to stem the glacial and bloody Russian advance.

“When I think about how cold it is in the trenches, I cry,” Mykhailivna said. 

Liudmyla Kostetska, a mother and the wife of a soldier, said, “We have become tougher, less naive, but not weaker.”

“It has taken away all the romance of ideas about ‘heroic survival.’ Now, we are simply holding on.”

ABC News’ Joseph Simonetti and Tom Soufi Burridge contributed to this report.