Winter on the Line: Life, Loss and the Looming Energy Crisis in Ukraine
The air in many Ukrainian cities already tastes faintly of coal smoke and the metallic tang of generators. In high-rise buildings that once hummed with everyday life—children riding elevators to school, neighbors exchanging bread and stories in the stairwell—there is now a quieter, more wary rhythm: the drip of tap water when it comes, the clack of improvised heaters, the distant whoosh of drones slicing the sky.
“You learn to listen for things you never thought you would,” says Oleksandra, a schoolteacher who has moved twice in two years to stay farther from front-line bombardment. “Sirens are not just a sound anymore. They are instructions.”
As Ukraine approaches its fourth winter since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the United Nations is warning that the fight has shifted from trenches and artillery to infrastructure—and civilians are paying the price.
The weaponization of power
“This is increasingly a technological war: a drone war,” Matthias Schmale, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, told reporters in Geneva. The numbers he presented were stark: this year has been deadlier for civilians than 2024, with a roughly 30% increase in civilian casualties, and about a third of recorded deaths and injuries in 2025 attributed to drone attacks.
Those figures are not just statistics on a chart. They translate into blocked hospitals, closed markets and families huddled in cold apartment blocks when the lights go out. Schmale warned that continued, concentrated strikes on energy production and distribution—which deliver the warmth, hot water and light that make winter survivable—could spark “a major crisis.”
“Destroying energy production and distribution capacity as winter starts clearly impacts the civilian population and is a form of terror,” he said. Repairs are happening, but where destruction outpaces rebuilding, whole neighborhoods can be stranded for days or weeks.
Everyday survival — a list of necessities
In the face of these threats, humanitarian planners are mapping the bare essentials people will need to get through months of cold and darkness. The UN’s winter response plan aims to reach more than 1.7 million people with:
- Heating support
- Cash assistance for families
- Emergency water and sanitation services
- Life-saving medical supplies
- Winter clothing and shelter for displaced people
But the plan is only half-funded. Schmale says the appeal is 50% covered—leaving an enormous gap at the very moment the line between relief and catastrophe narrows.
Front-line life: small gestures, large costs
Walk through a market on the edge of a contested town and you will see a civilization improvising. A woman sells homemade pickles in plastic jars she boiled to preserve; a pensioner warms his hands over a tiny gas stove, exchanging grim smiles with neighbors who remember a time when power outages were rare. These are acts of endurance, yes—but also practical measures against the cold and uncertainty.
“People are exhausted,” says Serhiy, an electrician who volunteers with a local repair crew. “We fix transformers at night by flashlight, then come back in the morning to do it again. You can only patch so much with so little.”
More than 57,000 evacuees have sought assistance at transit sites, Schmale said, a sign that mobility and supply chains are fraying where the front lines shift. Markets close to the front are becoming “increasingly dysfunctional,” he added—meaning that even those who stay behind can struggle to buy basics.
A generation of psychological wounds
Resilience is real. So is fatigue. “I am amazed by the resilience of people,” Schmale told reporters, but he was quick to caution: “Let’s not romanticise resilience.” The mental-health toll is mounting and will linger long after the guns quiet; the UN coordinator warned Ukraine may have to grapple with the psychosocial consequences “for at least a generation, if not several.”
Dr. Nina Kovalenko, a clinical psychologist working with displaced families, describes the patterns she sees: interrupted sleep, chronic anxiety, children who respond to loud noises by freezing. “Survival creates adaptations,” she says. “But those adaptations can calcify into trauma if there are no services, no time to grieve, no safe space to process what has happened.”
Repair crews and the arithmetic of destruction
Engineers and utility workers are the unsung front-line responders. They drive into areas still under threat to reconnect lines, patch ruptured pipes and restart boilers. But their tools are finite. “We can rebuild poles and transformers, but every strike sets us back,” Serhiy says. “If the pace of destruction outstrips the pace of repair, it’s not just inconvenience. It’s a humanitarian emergency.”
Schmale put it plainly: “There is no way that with the available resources we would be able to respond to a major crisis within a crisis.” Those words underscore a chilling arithmetic: fewer resources, more attacks, harsher weather—and more people pushed to the margins.
Politics, funding and a weary world
Diplomatic efforts to end the fighting have not delivered a ceasefire. High-level calls to pause hostilities have been rebuffed or have failed to gain traction, and the UN is planning for a future in which the war continues. “Our basic planning assumption for 2026 is the war is continuing,” Schmale said. “We’re sadly, dramatically, in this for the longer haul.”
That reality collides with another: the global humanitarian space is crowded. Humanitarian budgets are being stretched thin across multiple crises—from climate-driven disasters to conflicts elsewhere. Donor fatigue, competing priorities and domestic pressures in aid-supplying countries mean that appeals—for heating, for emergency repairs, for trauma counseling—often come up short.
“When winter comes, the consequences are immediate,” says Elena Petrov, director of a Kyiv-based NGO providing cash assistance. “People don’t ask for political outcomes when their pipes burst. They ask whether they can heat their home for their family.”
Why this matters to the world
This is not just a Ukrainian story. The attacks on power and water systems in Ukraine are a cautionary tale about modern warfare: conflict increasingly targets the critical infrastructure that makes urban life possible. The weaponization of energy raises questions about international norms, civilian protection and how the world responds when basic services become strategic targets.
What does it say about our global priorities when the combination of military technology and insufficient funding can tip a winter from hardship into catastrophe? How will policymakers, donors and citizens respond if the next cold season brings tens of thousands more into the cold?
Looking ahead
On a cold morning in a city near the line, Oleksandra pours tea into paper cups for the families gathered in the hallway. Children are coloring; an old radio plays a folk song as if to defy silence. “We keep going because we have to,” she says. “But there are days you can feel the weight.”
Humanity’s response in the coming months will tell us a great deal about our capacity for solidarity. Will governments and donors close the gap in the UN’s winter plan? Will international law adapt to new forms of technological warfare that strike at the heart of civilian life? And, as winter deepens, will the stories that emerge be about endurance or neglect?
These are hard questions. They deserve honest answers—and swift action. The season is coming. The lights, and lives, are on the line.
