In her Soviet-era apartment block on the outskirts of eastern Kyiv, Oksana Zinkovska-Boyarska lives with daily power cuts. The lift to her eighth-floor apartment often stops, the lights go out and sometimes the pumps maintaining pressure in the gas central heating fail.
She has a big rechargeable battery pack to keep appliances going, but it costs €2,000 (£1,770) and it only lasts so long. Her husband Ievgen, a lawyer, often has to work by torchlight. Their two-year-old daughter Katia plays by candlelight too.
Amid air raids and cold darkness, Oksana says she and Ievgen worry constantly for Katia. “I can’t describe with words the animal fear when you take your child to the shelter during the explosions.
“I have never felt anything like that in my life and I wouldn’t want anyone to feel anything like that. The thought that she might be scared because there’s no light – this is terrible.”
All across Ukraine, families are bracing themselves for even tougher times ahead – a long, cold winter in which Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts to finish off his invasion by striking Ukraine’s power supplies and networks.
Just last weekend, a massive drone and missile strike left much of the country for a time without power. Ukrainians are now enduring regular power cuts of up to 16 hours a day.
In winter, temperatures in Ukraine can plummet as low as -20C. One senior government figure told me they expect the next few months to be brutal.
“I think it will be the worst winter of our history,” says the official. “Russia will destroy our energy, our infrastructure, our heating. All state institutions should be prepared for the worst scenario.”
Maxim Timchenko, the chief executive of DTEK, a large private energy company in Ukraine, says: “Based on the intensity of attacks for the past two months, it is clear Russia is aiming for the complete destruction of Ukraine’s energy system.”
But according to one European envoy, it’s not just about people being cold at night or without light – there is more to Russia’s strategy.
“[This] is also about them not getting any bread from the bakery in the morning and not being able to go to work because there is no power for the factory,” says the envoy.
As the official puts it: “The goal of the Russians is to kill our economy.”
So how exactly will this strategy play out? And given that almost four years of war have taken their toll, what does it mean for Ukraine’s people – and the future of this long, hard war?
Frozen assets and suspended diplomacy
On the front line, the news is bleak. There are growing signs that the key eastern city of Pokrovsk may fall, giving Russian forces a boost in morale and a fresh platform to seize more of the Donetsk region.
Another issue that could impact morale is a massive corruption scandal affecting the government.
Prosecutors have accused ministers and officials of taking kickbacks from contracts to build defensive structures around Ukraine’s nuclear plants. Both of the ministers accused deny the allegations. But the risk for President Zelensky is that Ukrainians, many of whom are living in the cold and the dark, may lose trust in the administration.
What’s more, for now, diplomatic efforts to end the war appear to be on hold.
Plans of a summit between Putin and US President Donald Trump are on the back burner after Moscow refused to budge from its maximalist war aims and the US imposed sanctions on Russian oil and gas.
“There is currently a pause,” a Kremlin spokesman said this week, “the situation is stalled.”
All the while, European nations squabble over what to do with €180bn (£160bn) in frozen Russian assets. They plan to use the cash to raise a so-called “repatriation loan” for Ukraine, repaid only if Russia ever pays reparations after the end of the war.
But a row over how to share the risk has left Kyiv’s coffers looking distinctly bare.
Yet it is the energy crisis that is worrying the Ukrainian government most, according to those I spoke to. “People are tired after four years of the war,” the official tells me.
“I am afraid they will be demotivated.”
Insomnia, missiles and shifting morale
Walk the streets of Kyiv and you’ll pass a sea of tired faces – people’s eyes are red from a lack of sleep, their rest broken by the air raid sirens.
“I am tired of not sleeping enough,” says Yana Kolomiets, 31, a casting director from Odesa. “But… people who fight on the front line are tired [too].”
A recent scientific study suggested that people are three times more likely to suffer from insomnia in Ukraine than in countries at peace.
It tracked the sleep patterns of around 100 Ukrainians over six months, and found the insomnia persisted even on quiet nights. (The research was published by Texty, a data journalism website based in Ukraine.)
There have not been many quiet nights. Russia launched vast numbers of ballistic missiles at Ukraine in October – some 268 in all, the highest monthly total since the full-scale invasion, according to analysis published by the Oboz news site. The same month Russia launched 5,298 Shahed and other bomber drones.
Diplomats suggest there is a geographic focus to Russia’s tactics, their strikes deliberately targeting gas and electricity transmission networks in eastern Ukraine, rather than power stations in the west of the country.
“They are trying to cut Ukraine in two in terms of energy,” one European envoy says. “They want anywhere east of the river Dnipro to be cold this winter.”
The aim, one government source told me, is to “instigate an insurrection, so that people go against the government in Kyiv… they are trying to destroy social cohesion.”
So concerned is the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs it has already issued a formal warning, saying “the approaching winter poses new risks for Ukrainians… as intensified attacks on energy networks undermine efforts to maintain warmth in homes, schools and health centres”.
