On January 14, local authorities said that emergency repair teams are working at full capacity to restore power in the Kiev area, after successive Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, causing Ukrainians to face the coldest winter in years.
In Boryspil, a town in the Kiev region with about 60,000 inhabitants, workers dismantling and reinstalling damaged power systems are racing against time to overcome damage.
The head of the Boryspil area department of DTEK private electricity company, Mr. Yurii Bryzh, said that workers worked continuously in the snow, in conditions with temperatures dropping to -15 degrees Celsius, from early morning until midnight.
Currently, the power supply is only restored for about 4 hours a day. However, according to Mr. Bryzh, "when electricity comes back, people often turn on all electrical appliances in the house at the same time" to take advantage of washing, cooking or charging phones, causing the system to quickly overload and be interrupted again.
The difficulties of ordinary people are becoming increasingly serious, in the context that Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko described this as the longest and widest power outage since Russia launched a comprehensive military campaign nearly 4 years ago.
Apartments in the capital are freezing cold, and when going out, people have to wear many thick layers of clothes to resist the biting cold. Across Kiev, snow covers the ground and roofs, piled up along the roads. At night, the streets are dark, and high-rise apartment buildings are almost without lights in the windows.
According to Dennis Sakva, an energy analyst at Dragon Capital - an investment company in Ukraine, Russian attacks are mainly aimed at power plants and large transformer stations, while replacing equipment such as transformers may take months.
A middle-aged couple said that the temperature in their daughter's bedroom has dropped to -15 degrees Celsius. The family has a gas stove to cook, but at night the whole family has to share a bed, covered with many layers of thick blankets. "We have to use all the blankets in the house" - the wife said.
During the day, they take their daughters to work because there are generators there, while kindergartens do not have heating.
Ms. Zinaida Hlyha, 76, said she boiled water on a gas stove, poured it into a bottle and placed it in the bed to keep warm.
Meanwhile, Ms. Raisa Derhachova, 89, a single-person physicist, described the current weather situation in Ukraine as "terrible cold". "Of course, it is very difficult to survive this. We have overcome World War II, and now we have to face this terrible war again," Ms. Derhachova said.
