Cold war

Over a million people in Kyiv have been left without electricity, while thousands of apartment buildings have no heating. The authorities have been setting up heated marquees known as “points of invincibility” all over the city in their attempts to save lives during the harshest winter of the war so far. In these “heat islands”, people can warm themselves up and — crucially — recharge their devices.

In his Tuesday evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the situation in Kyiv as the hardest in the country, with over 1 million people being forced to spend days without electricity and over 4,000 apartment buildings left with no heating.

Around 3,000 apartment blocks remained without heating as of Thursday morning, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said, having estimated that some 600,000 people had left the Ukrainian capital since the start of January alone and warning that continuing Russian airstrikes on the city were driving it towards a “humanitarian catastrophe”.