The streets of Kyiv, Ukraine, have gone dark. Ukrainians are sleeping in winter coats and sleeping bags, stockpiling candles, and cooking meals on small gas burners as the country’s energy system buckles under sustained Russian attacks.
Ukraine is operating under a severe electricity deficit after months of missile and drone strikes targeting generation facilities and high-voltage substations. According to Ukrainian energy officials, available generation capacity is well below pre-war levels, forcing nationwide rolling blackouts that hit households and industry alike. This winter is the worst of the war, which began in February 2022.
Since January, the grid has been struck more than 200 times. Russia has shifted where it aims. Instead of hitting power plants directly, strikes now target substations and transmission lines that carry electricity across the country. Ukraine’s nuclear plants still generate the bulk of its power and can’t be attacked without catastrophic consequences, but the infrastructure that carries that power to cities, such as Kyiv and Kharkiv, is exposed and far easier to destroy. Along with this, thermal plants have been repeatedly hammered offline, hydropower output remains limited, and emergency imports from Europe only partially fill the gap during peak demand. Making things worse, the parts needed to fix what’s been destroyed: high-voltage transformers, switchgear, specialized components, take months to manufacture and are in short supply worldwide.
“When you generate the energy, you need to distribute it. There are about 10 distribution stations. Russia started attacking those distribution centers. The problem is: we have electricity we can generate, but we can’t deliver it to customers,” a high-level Ukrainian official told me. The official emphasized the shortage of spare parts.
All of this is happening during one of the coldest winters Ukraine has seen in years. Temperatures regularly drop below minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) and in some areas plunge past minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit). Millions of households have been left without electricity or heating for hours at a time, and in many regions, blackouts of up to 12 hours a day have become a fact of life.
There’s another problem.
Unknown to many in the West, Ukraine’s heating system is centralized, inherited from the period of the Soviet Union. Large, combined heat-and-power plants produce hot water and steam that are distributed through extensive pipe networks to entire districts, meaning tens of thousands of apartments depend on a single system rather than individual boilers. When a power plant is damaged or electricity is cut, heating goes down with it, even if the building itself still has power. Residents can’t just switch on a gas boiler or plug in a space heater the way households in Western Europe can.
On top of that, Russia has found new ways to get more of its weapons through to hit the power grid. Russia now launches thousands of cheap drones alongside powerful missiles all at once from different directions, overwhelming Ukraine’s ability to shoot them all down. The drones fly higher and faster, making them harder to bring down, especially for the mobile teams that do much of the interception work, since Ukraine can’t afford to waste its highly finite supply of million-dollar Patriot missiles on cheap drones. American and European air-defense resupply has been short and slow, and as a result, Ukraine’s interception rate dropped from above 95% to the low 80% range in 2025. That means dozens more munitions are smashing into critical infrastructure every month.
A NEW WORLD ORDER IS HERE, AND IT’S HERE TO STAY
For Ukraine, each winter is harder than the last. The freezing serves a purpose for the Kremlin. By plunging Kyiv and other cities into darkness and cold, Russia is betting that the weight of four winters under missiles, curfews, and power cuts will break what its army has failed to break on the battlefield.
Namely, the willingness of ordinary Ukrainians to keep going. It wants to push them to pressure their leaders to accept concessions at the negotiation table that they would otherwise not accept.
