Winter 2025–26: Russia Intensifies Attacks on Ukraine's Energy System
Kyiv residents slept in coats, heated bricks on gas stoves, collected snow for water, and pitched tents inside cold apartments. During the winter of 2025–26, years of accumulated damage met one of Ukraine's coldest seasons since the full-scale invasion.
Russia had attacked the energy system since 2022. The renewed campaign was especially punishing because repair crews were restoring facilities already struck several times, while air-defence ammunition had become scarcer.
Coordinated Waves
Large attacks intensified from autumn 2025 and continued through January and February. Russia combined hundreds of Shahed-type drones and decoys with cruise and ballistic missiles, forcing Ukraine to divide limited interceptors among many simultaneous tracks.
Weapons struck power generation, transmission substations, distribution networks, gas facilities, and systems supporting district heating. Damage at a few high-voltage nodes could disconnect power far beyond the immediate impact site.
Russia said it attacked infrastructure connected to Ukraine's military and defence industry, sometimes describing strikes as retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy sites. The dual use of a grid does not erase the requirement to distinguish targets and weigh foreseeable civilian harm.
A Capital Without Heat
Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, and other cities experienced severe disruptions. A January 20 attack involving more than 330 drones and nearly three dozen missiles cut electricity to more than one million Kyiv residents and affected substations carrying power from nuclear plants.
Other waves left thousands of apartment buildings without heating. Temperatures repeatedly stayed below freezing and at times approached minus 20 degrees Celsius, turning loss of electricity, water pumps, and central heat into a direct health risk.
Families moved between warming centres, metro stations, relatives' homes, and buildings with generators. Lifts stopped, mobile networks weakened, pipes froze, and medical and social services had to run on backup power.
Repair Under Repeated Attack
Ukrainian engineers rerouted electricity, cannibalised equipment, installed imported transformers, and returned damaged units to service. European connections supplied emergency imports, while businesses and households relied on generators and batteries.
Each repair offered only temporary resilience if the site remained on a targeting list. Components for Soviet-era plants were difficult to replace, and crews worked around live systems, rubble, unexploded weapons, and the possibility of another strike.
Air defence became the limiting resource. Cheap drones could be engaged by guns, mobile teams, electronic warfare, or interceptor drones, but ballistic missiles required scarce high-end systems such as Patriot and equally scarce interceptor rounds.
Humanitarian and Legal Findings
The UN Human Rights Office investigated the winter campaign and found that Russian forces systematically and repeatedly targeted energy facilities, often with hundreds of weapons in coordinated attacks. Its June 2026 report concluded that the attacks appeared to violate fundamental humanitarian-law principles.
From December 2025 through May 2026, the UN verified 1,272 civilians killed and 6,871 injured from conflict-related violence overall, 40 percent more casualties than in the same period a year earlier. The energy damage compounded that direct harm by disrupting services for millions.
Negotiations in the Cold
U.S.-brokered negotiations continued while the attacks intensified. Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Abu Dhabi as parts of Kyiv struggled without reliable heat and power, demonstrating that diplomatic contact had not produced even a stable energy moratorium.
The winter campaign did not permanently collapse the national grid. It forced repeated emergency schedules and imposed an enormous civilian cost, while repair workers and households kept adapting faster than destruction could make the country unlivable.
That resilience should not obscure the strategy. Electricity and heating remained targets because modern urban life depends on them, and freezing weather multiplied the leverage of every damaged transformer.
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