Winter blackout Russian strikes have left hundreds of Kyiv apartment buildings without heat or power amid freezing temperatures
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On the night of January 8, Russian forces carried out a massive strike on Kyiv, knocking out a significant portion of the city’s heating, power, and water supplies. The following day, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that nearly half of the city’s apartment buildings — about 6,000 in total — had been left without heat, and urged residents to leave the city if possible.
Soon after the strike, a severe cold snap hit Kyiv. The inclement weather and ice created additional difficulties for repair crews working to restore damaged infrastructure. Ukrainian energy company DTEK described the electricity situation as “the most difficult of the entire winter.”
Five days later, on January 14, Klitschko said that conditions in Kyiv remained “very difficult.” “Nothing on this scale has happened in the four years of the full-scale war,” he wrote. According to the mayor, around 400 high-rise residential buildings in the city were still without heating.
Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of Ukraine’s Energy Research Center, echoed the mayor, calling the energy situation in Kyiv unprecedented. “There has never been an attack anywhere in the world that destroys a city’s central heating system while it’s –15 degrees Celsius [five degrees Fahrenheit],” he said.
On January 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that a state of emergency would be declared in Ukraine’s energy sector and that the government would amend curfew rules for the duration of the cold spell. “People should have the maximum possible access to support centers, and businesses should be able to plan their operations with the energy situation in mind,” Zelensky said.
At the same time, the president said that Kyiv had “unfortunately done far less” than other regions to prepare for an energy crisis. Klitschko responded that such statements by the president “undermine the selfless work of thousands of specialists” who are working around the clock to restore electricity and heat.