Russia is trying to freeze Ukraine into submission. As temperatures plunge to -20°C in Kyiv, the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) has stepped up its barrage of drones and ballistic missiles to take out key heating and power infrastructure. Half of Ukraine’s capital is now in subzero darkness and the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said that anyone with somewhere else to go should leave. He is not the only one. Other governors in frontline regions have said the same.

The attacks are country wide. Russian forces launched another massive overnight drone attack on Zelenskiy’s home town of Kryvyi Rih on January 13, knocking out heat to more than 700 apartment buildings and cutting electricity to over 45,000 customers as temperatures dropped to –7°C, local officials said.

“Russia is attacking energy infrastructure in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions. Russia deliberately plans these attacks during very cold weather to maximize the damage and bring more suffering to Ukrainian civilians,” Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and founder of the Institute of the Future, said in a social media post this week.

The extreme cold temperatures of deep winter have arrived, with the mercury falling below -15°C. Russia has been attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for more than two years, but the Kremlin has been waiting for the icy Siberian airmasses to settle over Ukraine, as they do every year, and is now scaling up the attacks. The targets have changed too. The non-nuclear generating capacity is already largely destroyed, but now the AFR is hitting the infrastructure – things like power substations, gas pipelines and hot water pumping stations. In just one attack this week, Russia used over 300 drones, 18 ballistic and seven cruise missiles to target energy that deprived people of power, water, and heating on January 13, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.

“Russia is deliberately trying to inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of the Ukrainian people—which falls exactly under the definition of Article II (c) of the Genocide Convention,” Sybiha said following the barrage against Kyiv.

Weaponizing the weather

Turning off the lights in Ukraine has been a long-standing strategy. Putin is using his ability to take out civilian energy infrastructure with highly accurate and powerful guided missiles as a tool in his ongoing efforts to force Ukraine to capitulate on Russian terms. While the damage has been dramatic and devastating, in typical Putin-style it has also been incremental. Putin has been proceeding step by step, starting with the generating capacity, but ignoring the substations until now.

Russia began to target the power sector in 2023 and over the next two years it destroyed virtually all of Ukraine’s non-nuclear generating capacity. Off limits for obvious reasons, the nuclear power stations have been left alone and account for about half of Ukraine’s generating capacity, but the substations that distribute their power have also been largely untouched so far.

With reduced output, last winter was harsh but between the repairs, imports, temporary container-sized generators largely supplied by USAID, and the surviving nuclear capacity the country managed to struggle through the season.

As deep winter arrives this year, the situation is already much more difficult. Since a missile war began this summer and Russia’s military production went into surplus, the AFR has changed tactics. It now flies in waves of hundreds of drones to denigrate air defences that are followed by a few powerful ballistic missiles that can destroy a target completely.

Power plants have been made vulnerable by the Energoatom corruption scandal. While Ukrenergo, the state-owned thermal utilities operator, built some 70 highly effective concrete bunkers to protect its infrastructure, a similar plan for nuclear power infrastructure under the control of Energoatom was never implemented, when Zelenskiy’s close associates siphoned off $100mn in a kickback scheme that was supposed to be spent on defences. At the same time the $1bn in foreign aid for the power sector raised by Ukrenergo fell away to almost nothing partly due to corruption in the sector.

The AFR is now capitalising on this weakness and has been targeting key energy and transport infrastructure that can knock out the power in entire cities and regions. Ukraine’s key ultra-high voltage 750kV substations are especially vulnerable, which provide power to whole cities and act as the regional interconnectors. So far, Russia has deliberately avoided hitting these hard to protect and hard to fix substations, but in the last two months the 750kV substations in Sumy and Odesa were knocked out leaving both in darkness for over a week.

Similar substation attacks are now being reported in Kyiv and other cities. A third of Kyiv is now without power or heat for several days, which has sparked limited public protests as the city starts to be uninhabitable, according to local reports.

Siberian airmasses arrive in Ukraine

Russia has clearly been waiting for the coldest part of the year to scale up its attack. A large cold mass of icy air from Siberia is now trapped over the country and temperatures have dropped below -20°C. In Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, temperatures will regularly drop to around −20°C over the next at least 14 days, according to the Ventusky metrological service, while daytime highs will be only around −10°C. These are below-average temperatures which, according to current forecasts, could persist throughout the entire month of January.

Families in Soviet-era apartment blocks have taken to huddling together in the smallest rooms to try and keep warm as internal temperatures fall to 13°C-15°C and will fall further. The “invincibility points” are back in use – small huts set up in the courtyard of apartment complexes where locals can go to warm up, cook some food and recharge their phones that were deployed after two years of the war during the first big missile barrages in January 2024.

With no prospect of the heating being restored soon, apartment block management have drained the water from central heating pipes to avoid them freezing and bursting. The bitterly cold weather is also shutting down supermarkets and offices.

“The humanitarian crisis in Kyiv and the region is intensifying amid prolonged power outages and severe winter conditions, Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary said on social media. “​For the second consecutive day, photos and videos of empty store shelves—particularly bread—have been circulating widely on social media. Several supermarket chains have partially or temporarily closed locations due to extended blackouts and equipment failures in sub-zero temperatures.”

Ukraine's retail chains are starting to collapse. More and more stores cannot open or are suspending operations indefinitely after their equipment -- primarily refrigeration units -- cannot withstand the constant power surges and outages. The surges lead to breakdowns, product spoilage, and massive losses, leaving the urban populations unable to meet their basic needs. Photos of empty shelves are starting to pop up on social media as residents hunt for bread and other basics.

Public transport remains severely disrupted too. Kyiv’s metro is operating with delays or reduced service in many areas, while ground transport struggles with snow, ice, and power issues.

In some districts of Kyiv, residents are blocking roads in protest over multi-day blackouts. Windows in apartment blocks are blown out by constant missile and drone attacks but go unrepaired. In other cases, workers turn up at their offices only to go home again in a few hours thanks to the intense cold, reports Mendel.

A large-scale humanitarian crisis is brewing. If Russia’s campaign continues then western governments have been warned to prepare for a fresh wave of refugees fleeing the freezing conditions, bne IntelliNews diplomatic sources say.