Kateryna Skurydina’s Battle Against the Cold
Kateryna Skurydina goes to bed wearing thermal underwear, two jumpers, and a scarf. She covers herself with a down duvet and two blankets. But her secret weapon is her cat, Pushok. “He has a high body temperature. So he’s like a hot water bottle,” she told CNN.
The Impact of Russia’s Attack on Kyiv
The heating in Skurydina’s Kyiv apartment has been mostly off since Russia launched a massive attack on the city’s energy infrastructure on January 8, leaving hundreds of thousands of households, businesses, and schools in the capital without power. Temperatures have dropped as low as –19 degrees Celsius (–2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) this week, and officials say the timing of Russia’s strikes—in the middle of what the prime minister called the harshest winter in 20 years—is no coincidence.
Adapting to Life Without Power
Like most Ukrainians, Skurydina is now used to living with constant power outages. She has multiple power banks and blackout-proof gadgets. Her apartment is full of artificial USB-powered candles, Christmas lights, and camping lanterns. The cold, though, is new. The temperature inside her building has been as low as 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past few days, a full eight degrees below the indoor temperature the World Health Organization recommends as healthy.
“It’s very difficult mentally. Now that I’ve lost my heating, I’ve realized that I don’t really need electricity that much. When you have heating but no electricity, everything is fine,” she said, pointing to her habit of turning to exercise to boost her mood during the blackouts. “Sport keeps me going. I go to a gym which runs on eco-fuel. (But) yesterday, they even (shut) the gym because there is no heating and it is very cold. You can’t go anywhere.”
Emergency Measures Across Ukraine
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky declared a state of emergency for the country’s energy sector on Wednesday, admitting that the consequences of the Russian strikes and the extremely low temperatures were very severe. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said that 300 multi-story buildings in the capital remained without heating as of Thursday, down from the 6,000 that had no heat supply after the massive attack a week earlier.
While Kyiv has been the worst affected, emergency power outages have been reported across the country. Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that a large-scale Russian attack on Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky’s hometown in central Ukraine, had left tens of thousands of people without power. Major outages were also reported in Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine. On Thursday, attacks knocked out power in Zhytomyr in the west and Kharkiv in the northeast, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy.
Many schools have shut, unable to heat up classrooms to safe temperatures. Shops, cafes, and restaurants that could normally provide some respite to residents looking for warmth and a power supply have also been forced to close. It has been so cold this week that some diesel power generators—vital to keep the lights on when supply from the grid is cut off—have stopped working.
