To Break Ukraine’s Morale, Russia Weaponizes Winter

Night after night this winter, Russian rockets try to achieve in eastern Ukraine what Mother Nature achieved yesterday in the eastern United States: deprive millions of people of heat and electricity.As Ukraine battles the harshest winter of its four-year-old defensive war, Russia’s missileers enlist the aid of their nation’s historic ally, “Генерал Мороз” or “General Frost.” Russians are taught that the legendary Russian winter blocked the Swedes in 1708, Napoleon in 1812, and Hitler in 1941. Now, with Kyiv’s mighty Dnipro River frozen over, the Kremlin bets that Siberian cold fronts will combine with drone and ballistic missile strikes to break the morale of Ukraine’s 30 million civilians.Targeting the three largest cities of eastern Ukraine — Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro — Russia has repeatedly attacked power generating plants. Simultaneously, they have bombed transmission lines, seeking to isolate the big cities from the national grid. The most recent rocket blitz — the third of this month — hit the capital on Saturday, just as PresidentTrump’s envoys were mediating in Abu Dhabi the first ever face to face peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.That bombing of Kyiv was so intense that half of the city’s apartment buildings were left without heat. Mayor Vitali Klitschko, a former world heavyweight boxing champion, urged residents to temporarily leave the capital for the houses of relatives living in areas with heat and power. Kyiv had a pre-war population of 3 million, slightly more than that of Rome. While President Putin seeks to make Ukraine’s capital uninhabitable, European nations respond by shipping 1,000 transformers by truck and train to Kyiv.Last Thursday, Ukraine’s energy system suffered the most intense attack since November 2022, said Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal. Writing on Telegram yesterday, Mr. Shmyhal said more than 800,000 Kyiv households were still without power.“Russia is betting it can break us through energy terror,” Mr. Shmyhal told Ukraine’s parliament. He said there was “not a single power plant left in Ukraine that has not been attacked by the enemy.” The World Bank estimates that it will cost at least $20 billion to rebuild Ukraine’s energy system.President Volodymyr Zelensky summed up yesterday on X: “This week alone, the Russians have launched [against Ukraine] more than 1,700 attack drones, over 1,380 guided aerial bombs, and 69 missiles of various types.”About 50,000 power laborers work around the clock to reroute power and restore electricity to Ukraine’s big cities. On Wednesday, a senior executive, Oleksii Brekhet, of Ukraine’s largest energy company, Ukrenergo, was electrocuted while he worked to restore a substation after a Russian strike.Once a graceful eastern European city, known for its cafe culture and 17th century churches, Kyiv last week lived through its 2,000th air raid alert since President Vladimir Putin launched his frontal assault on the nation on February 24, 2022. This week, Kyiv schools will be closed due to lack of heat. Pensioners are marooned in highrise apartment buildings, sleeping in their coats, surviving on heat from gas stoves and cooking food carried up numerous flights of stairs by their children or community-spirited neighbors.“Children and families are in constant survival mode,” Unicef’s country representative for Ukraine, Munir Mammadzade, told reporters last week at Geneva. As residents melt snow for drinking water, the chief executive, Maxim Timchenko, of Ukraine’s top private energy firm, DTEK, warned Reuters that Ukraine is “close to a humanitarian catastrophe.”On the street level, people pack “resilience centers” — heated tents where they charge cell phones, cook meals, use toilets, and enjoy warmth on nights that dip below zero Fahrenheit. With the city sometimes surviving on as little as 10 percent of its pre-war electricity consumption, city workers have doused street lights, billboards, and illumination of historic facades.“The intent is to plunge civilians into darkness and deprivation, using winter as a weapon,” an international lawyers’ group wrote at the start of the winter. “The deliberate use of cold and darkness to break morale indicates an intent to terrorize, which is explicitly prohibited under the laws of war.” Two years ago, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two top Russian military officers — a Black Sea naval admiral and an air force general — for orchestrating the campaign to target civilian targets.In retaliation, Ukraine seeks to match Russia’s energy warfare. In recent days, Ukrainian drones have caused blackouts in the Russian regions of Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, and Taganrog. Saturday night, Belgorod suffered the most intensive attack of the war, according to the regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. Local news channels reported more than 50 explosions. Yet the Kremlin looks at these border regions as flyover country. The politically crucial cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are well-protected by air defense, leaving them largely untouched by the war. “Russia attacks energy, and this is what they are focusing on, and this is not a secret. This is not a mistake. This is their goal to cause blackouts in Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky told the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland on Friday. “It’s about everything — hospitals, kindergartens, schools — but mostly it’s about the tactical things, which they are focusing on destroying: electricity, heating systems, water supplies, everything.” He said Ukraine is trapped in a Russian nightmare similar to the one created in the movie “Groundhog Day.”The day before, Ukraine’s president met at Davos with President Trump. On the plane home, Mr. Trump told reporters: “It’s really tough for the people of Ukraine, how they live without heat, with 20 degrees below [freezing]. That’s very cold. That’s a colder climate for the most part than Canada.” Trump administration officials say both countries are on “the last mile” to a ceasefire and a comprehensive peace agreement. The big sticking point is territory. Mr. Putin seeks a slice of eastern Ukraine that his troops have been unable to conquer since he first started attacking Ukraine, 12 years ago.At Davos on Thursday, Mr. Trump’s former envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg Jr., noted that Russia’s major assault on Ukraine now has lasted longer than the time it took the Soviet Union to conquer Germany in World War II. Mr. Kellogg, a retired United States Army lieutenant general, told Ukrainians: “It’s a terrible, harsh winter. But if Ukraine makes it through January and February, and reaches March and April, the advantage will be on your side, not Russia’s.”The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicts that Siberian cold fronts will keep East European temperatures 10 degrees below average through early February.

To Break Ukraine’s Morale, Russia Weaponizes Winter

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