‘Dear residents! If you’re in the lift when the lights go off, don’t be scared,’ read the printed A4 sheet stuck to the inside of the rickety elevator in an apartment block on Kyiv’s left bank. ‘When the power comes back, count to ten before pressing the button.’ A ‘chaotic pressing of buttons’ might cause the lift to fail, in which case ‘it won’t go anywhere.’ It was -10ºC outside and only 10ºC in Yulia’s flat, but she told me this was a good day: the radiators weren’t stone cold. Engineers had reconnected the building to the district heating network, two weeks after the massive Russian attack on the city’s thermal power plants. She touched a radiator, beaming, and I did the same; it was lukewarm at best. Yulia’s skin was cracked from the cold. She works from this one-room apartment, as well as sleeping here; in the bed was a nest of two-litre plastic bottles filled with water that she boils on a camping stove. You can’t sit still during the day, she said, or you get too cold. ‘You can’t really ever relax.’

The 9 January attack, which left six thousand Kyiv housing blocks without heating, was far from the first Russian assault on Ukraine’s energy grid – it has been their strategy since autumn 2022. But the destruction of thermal power plants, as well as substations and the distribution network, which has taken place throughout this winter has now coincided with the coldest weather Ukraine has had in years, with temperatures dropping below -20ºC. Cities across the country have been affected by blackouts and problems with district heating, but conditions in the capital are particularly severe. One glance out of the window of Yulia’s flat showed why: sheer density. High-rise blocks, twelve or sixteen-storey Soviet prefabs, and newer, even taller, buildings of concrete or glass march into the distance; almost none of these thousands of rooms had a light on.

Kyiv has the third most high-rise residential blocks (buildings between twelve and forty floors) of any city in Europe. Moscow is top of the list, with St Petersburg second. District heating supplies a large proportion of Kyiv’s 1600 high-rise blocks: your radiators turn on late in the year and remain very hot until winter is over. In a cold climate, it’s an efficient way to deliver heating and hot water to a large number of people. But in war the system is horribly vulnerable. Russia aims its missiles and drones at the massive, ageing plants dotted around Kyiv, and if there are no air defence missiles to shoot them down, it quickly creates a crisis. Ukraine’s capacity to generate electricity has largely been destroyed; the grid relies on three functioning nuclear power stations and imports from Europe. Everyone had got used to a blackout schedule: power came and went according to the timetable published for each district. But now, in many places, there is no timetable. Blackouts last days, not hours. And the newer apartment blocks are crippled without electricity. There are no gas stoves to boil water and no water in the taps – try walking up 25 floors with a ten-gallon water container.

Berezniaky is a pleasant high-rise neighbourhood on the left bank, built in the 1970s. Natasha, who is in her seventies, is on the 13th floor. Her flat has a gas stove, and when I visited, pairs of thick socks were drying in the oven. ‘Gas has saved me,’ she said. From her kitchen window, the right bank of the city was visible through the freezing mist; the 335-foot Mother Ukraine statue held her sword aloft. Also visible were the striped towers of a thermal heating plant, its chimneys billowing steam. Natasha said that her block’s transformer had burned out as a result of voltage fluctuations. A generator on the street churned away, supplying emergency power to keep the lift running. It was emblazoned with German and EU stickers. ‘They say more generators are coming from Europe, but who knows when they’ll arrive,’ she said. ‘It’ll be spring soon anyway.’

On the night of 23 January, my second night in Kyiv, the Russians hit the city. On the online channels that try to predict attacks I watched clusters of drones moving on a map and checked missile trajectories, shown in pink. Explosions woke me up and by 2 a.m. I was studying a diagram of a Zircon hypersonic nuclear-capable missile as one roared towards the city from occupied Crimea. ‘Ballistic, target not fixed yet,’ Kyiv Sky said. Later, it warned of ‘twelve Shaheds over Kyiv’: these drones, developed by Iran, are frequently used in Russian attacks. Power and heat plants were targeted, and by the morning, many of the buildings that had only just regained heat were without it again. ‘Peace’ talks were being held in Abu Dhabi that same day: the first trilateral meeting since the invasion.

The next morning the city was quiet. In the botanical gardens, the golden domes of the monastery peeked through snow-dusted trees, the river far below. My friend, on leave from the army, wanted to be inside: he’d been living outdoors for months. But his flat was cold and dark, and his nights were still punctuated by explosions.

There are now 1300 emergency shelters in Kyiv, run by local authorities and charities. In Troieshchyna, a dormitory district of nearly 300,000 people in the north-east of the city, there were tents with phone chargers, cups of tea and biscuits, and kids playing Monopoly. I spoke to Lina, a woman in her forties. Her fifteenth-floor flat had no water so she’d moved out to a village with her small children. Her older son wanted to stay, and she had come to check on him. His father, a soldier, had sent him sleeping bags. That this weather is even harder for soldiers on the front line is something almost everyone mentioned.

The prefab blocks outside were disfigured by nearly four years of war: black scorch marks where a drone had struck, chipboard over the windows. Andriy, displaced from Zaporizhzhia, described the strike: ‘The bomb didn’t detonate, but it smashed through two windows, and the fuel leaked out and caught fire. I’ve seen it repeatedly. If a Shahed does explode, that’s six apartments gone. The floors can collapse, it’s a horror show. Just a pile of concrete, people buried under the debris.’ He rubbed a hand across his face. The blackouts, he said, had been easier to deal with when they were scheduled. ‘To put it plainly, logistics are failing.’ Could the authorities have prepared better for this? ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘There’s corruption, it hasn’t been eradicated. They still steal, just like everywhere else.’

Last November, Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau, NABU, uncovered a $100 million embezzlement scheme in which companies supplying the country’s nuclear energy operator, Energoatom, paid kickbacks of 10 or 15 per cent to several senior figures. Arrests were made. The main suspect, Timur Mindich, is a former business partner of Volodymyr Zelensky; they co-founded the media company Kvartal 95. He fled the country. Ukraine’s justice and energy ministers, both of whom were said to have received payments, resigned, and the former deputy prime minister, already accused of bribery and abuse of office in a separate case, was also implicated. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, resigned a couple of weeks later, after his house was searched. In July Zelensky had tried to restrict NABU’s powers, but backed down after large-scale protests. The kickbacks had come from contracts to build fortifications to protect power plants from air attack. None of this looks good, especially when Ukrainians are living in the dark and the cold.

A young emergency services worker in a shelter was more upbeat. People are helping each other, he said. ‘They buy groceries for elderly people, give someone a ride for free, they go to heat water at someone else’s place. They are unbreakable, they are coming together.’ In Rusanivka two girls tumbled into a tent dragging plastic sledges, their clothes caked in snow. Schools have been shut – or are online – and the frozen Dnipro and its steep embankment are covered in little figures sledging and playing. But as night falls the dark blocks of flats along the riverbank are a reminder of what Kyiv is enduring. For all those holding impromptu raves on the river – inspiring outpourings in Western media on the resilience of Ukrainians – there are many more who can’t get out, stuck on high floors without electricity or heat, ill or disabled, or just exhausted by the daily grind of surviving. On 29 January Trump claimed that because of the cold he’d asked Putin ‘not to fire into Kyiv and various towns for a week, and he agreed to do that. I have to tell you it was very nice.’ Any agreement didn’t even last a week. On the night of 2 February drones and missiles hit Kyiv again in advance of more inconclusive talks in Abu Dhabi.