Under the Flicker of Broken Lines: How a War on Infrastructure Feels Where the Lights Go Out
From the manicured lawns of the White House to the salted potholes of Donetsk, the conversation about the war in Ukraine has narrowed and widened at once—narrowed to the cold, precise language of sanctions and troop counts, widened to the incandescent, everyday reality of people warming hands over stove flames in winter. “I might,” President Donald Trump said matter-of-factly when asked whether his administration would add new sanctions on Russia. He spoke those two words in the presence of Finland’s head of state, then added a conciliatory nod toward NATO: “We’re stepping up the pressure… NATO has been great.”
Those two syllables—”I might”—land like a weather forecast that suggests wind but not yet a storm. They speak to leverage being reviewed, options being held in reserve. They also mirror the uncertainty millions live with on both sides of the front line, where the state of the energy grid can mean the difference between a normal night’s sleep and a night spent huddled around a kerosene heater.
The strategic eclipse of heat and rails
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been blunt in public and private briefing: Moscow’s campaign increasingly targets energy and transport lines, not merely to damage equipment but to unsettle people. “Their task,” he told journalists, “is to create chaos and to apply psychological pressure on the population through strikes on energy facilities and railways.”
It is a strategy seen in winters past. The strikes of 2022, 2023 and 2024 plunged millions into rolling blackouts, turning apartments into cold shells and schools into emergency shelters. In recent weeks, renewed aerial and missile strikes have once more hit substations, compressor stations and rail yards, fraying what little redundancy remains in the national grid.
Outside Kramatorsk, technicians in fluorescent vests climb poles in the bitter wind, fingers numb as they splice live wires. Maria, a schoolteacher with soot on her cheeks from a shared stove, told me, “You learn quickly what matters. Tea, a hot plate, a candle—you plan the day around when the power comes back.” Her voice carried no theatrical outrage, just a practical exhaustion that feels larger than either Moscow or Kyiv.
When pipelines hiss and a toxic cloud rises
Not all damage comes from high explosives. Near the frontline village of Rusin Yar in Donetsk, a pipeline—the old Tolyatti-Odesa artery that once moved ammonia for fertilizer from Russian plants to Ukrainian ports—was reported damaged. Moscow’s defence ministry accused Kyiv of blowing the pipeline during a retreat, producing plumes of toxic gas. Ukrainian regional authorities confirmed the pipeline was “damaged” but said the incident did not pose an immediate danger to local residents.
Ammonia is an invisible, chilling reminder of how war collides with agriculture and livelihoods. Before 2022 the pipeline moved millions of tonnes; today it is a dead artery, a hazard, a claim and a counterclaim. Nobody wants to stand beside a hissing pipe and pretend geopolitics is an abstract exercise.
Bombs, drones and a new kind of supply-chain war
On both sides, the war has become a calculated campaign to constrict the other’s capacity to project power. Kyiv has launched drones and missile strikes into Russian territory, targeting fuel facilities and transport nodes. “We believe they’ve lost up to 20% of their gasoline supply as a result of our strikes,” President Zelensky said, a statistic meant to translate battlefield action into economic pressure.
Petro Ivanov, an energy analyst in Kyiv, warned, “When you puncture a logistics chain, damage is non-linear. A burned substation can ripple into weeks of supply constraints, increased transport costs and, crucially, vulnerability in winter.” In Volgograd, fires at fuel and energy facilities after an alleged Ukrainian drone attack were reported by regional authorities. The images—flame licking towers at night—felt eerily like a repeat of old wars updated for a new century.
People, not lines: the human cost behind the numbers
Numbers are blunt instruments but they matter. Since 2022, the conflict has forced millions from their homes. Estimates vary, but humanitarian agencies consistently report that well over 8 million people inside Ukraine have been displaced at least once, and several million have sought refuge abroad. Tens of thousands—both civilians and soldiers—have been killed or wounded, and about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory lies under Russian control, much of it scarred by fighting.
In Sumy region, a recent barrage of UAVs and guided aerial bombs left three men dead and two wounded, local officials said. Oleg Grygorov, head of Sumy’s regional military administration, lamented on social media, “They are attacking communities—this is not abstract warfare, it is people going about their lives, then their lives being taken.”
Families in small towns describe improvisation as a daily ritual. A butcher in Bakhmut keeps a pocket generator that he fires up to hack through a day’s work when the grid goes down. A grandmother in a Kyiv suburb stacks blankets in a particular order—down, wool, down—because she has learned the hours when heat can be hoarded.
What the rest of the world is watching—and what it might mean
Western capitals watch with a blend of alarm and calculation. Sanctions remain the blunt tool favored in the halls of diplomacy: targeted, scalable, but never guaranteed. “Sanctions can pinch, but they rarely change strategies overnight,” said Lina Markova, an international sanctions specialist. “What they do well is raise costs and close options. But when a war has existential narratives attached, costs are often accepted.”
There are broader themes at play: the weaponization of energy and logistics; the role of private contractors and drones as force multipliers; the increasing normalization of violence against infrastructure. This is not merely a regional war; it is a test case for how 21st-century conflicts will attempt to bend civilian life itself into a theater of operations.
- Conflict started in earnest with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
- Millions displaced internally and internationally; tens of thousands of casualties reported.
- Energy infrastructure—substations, pipelines, compressor stations—has been a repeated target.
- Both sides increasingly strike at transport and fuel supply chains, escalating economic and human costs.
Where do we look for light?
There are moments of humanity that defy the statistics. Volunteers in a small collective in eastern Ukraine stitched thermal blankets for children who lost heating. Neighbourhood groups share diesel and generators. A railway worker in Lviv, who asked to be called Andriy, said simply, “We fix, then we fix again. The tracks are our backbone.” His pride was neither naive nor naïve—it was the stubborn muscle of people refusing to be reduced to numbers.
What does the international community owe, beyond sanctions and soundbites? How do we protect the invisible infrastructure of everyday life—the electricity that allows hospitals to function, the rails that carry medicine, the pipelines that feed farmers? And perhaps most importantly: how do we keep our attention trained on the human faces when images of maps and missiles dominate the feed?
When the lights go out in a Kyiv apartment, it’s not a geopolitical abstraction that sits in the dark. It’s a mother worrying about the baby’s milk, an elderly man deciding whether to risk the walk to a pharmacy, a teacher canceling a lesson. The work of war today is often the work of steady hands and quick fixes, of volunteers and linemen, of diplomats and the quiet courage of people living under pressure.
So when leaders say, “I might”—or when they pledge to “step up the pressure”—listen not just for policy but for consequence. The future of winter, of heat, of food and schools, is being decided by decisions far from kitchen tables. What do we do when wars attack what keeps us warm? That is the question that will shape what comes next.
