KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Olena Janchuk spends another day of frozen isolation in her high-rise apartment.
The former kindergarten teacher suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis and has been stuck for weeks on the 19th floor of her apartment building in Kiev, 650 feet above the ground.
Long daily outages caused by Russian bombing of power plants and transmission lines have made working elevators a luxury.
With January temperatures dipping to minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), there is a permanent line of frost inside Janchuk’s windows, white patterns creeping across the glass in the morning.
The 53-year-old crouches over a makeshift fireplace of candles arranged under stacked bricks designed to absorb and slowly release heat. USB charging cables snake across the floor from overloaded power sockets, while her electric blanket is connected to a sensible power bank for the coldest hours.
“When there’s no light and heat for seventeen and a half hours, you’ve got to find something,” she said. “Bricks work best in a small room, so we stay there.”
By day, the family moves into rooms that catch the winter sun, the function of each space changing with the blackout schedule. At night, heavy clothes stay inside as the apartment cools down quickly without central heating.
Kiev, a city of about 3 million people, is dominated by tower blocks, many from the Soviet era, now without power for most of the day.
In this fourth winter of war, electricity is a rational commodity.
Residents plan their lives around electrical schedules: when to cook, shower, charge phones and run washing machines. Food is chosen for shelf life, water filtered in bottles and stored in buckets. Small camping gas burners are used to heat soup or tea when the power is out.
Sleep is broken by air raid sirens and the need to use electricity during peak hours.
Outside, across snow-covered Kiev, diesel generators rumble through shopping streets. Shoppers navigate the aisles using phone flashlights, and the bars glow by candlelight.
Apps notify users of narrowing power windows — usually just a few hours — long enough for a home restart.
Life gets harder on the upper floors
Janchuk’s 22-story building is located near a power plant, and residents can see missile and drone attacks firsthand, with flashes lighting up the skyline at night.
During blackouts, they climb the stairs in the dark, phone lights bouncing off the concrete steps, often accompanied by the echo of children and barking dogs. People sometimes leave plastic bags of cookies or water inside the elevators for those who get stuck when the power goes out in the middle.
Janchuk’s husband, who works most of the day, brings in the groceries in the evening, while her mother, Lyudmila Bachurina, 72, does the chores.
“It’s cold, but we’re doing,” says Mom, holding a square USB-charged flashlight she recently mounted on the wall. “When the lights come on, I start running the washing machine, filling water bottles, cooking food, charging power banks, running around the kitchen and running around the house.”
In upscale neighborhoods, residents pool their funds for generators to keep the elevators running. But most blocks of flats – home to pensioners, families and people with disabilities – cannot afford them.
Disability advocates, including groups representing wounded war veterans, say the stairs have become an invisible social barrier, locking people in their own homes.
They are urging city officials to fund generators for residential buildings.
Until then, life bends around the electricity schedule. USB lamps, power banks and inverter batteries have become household staples. Telegram chats help neighbors check in on seniors and exchange outage updates.
From the upper floors, Kyivans look out over a skyline of the city’s tall buildings and historic golden-domed churches. At night, flashes of explosions are visible as Russia continues its campaign against Ukraine’s energy system.
Russia has caused great damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure
Too many power plants and transmission lines have been affected to meet demand, even with electricity imports from Europe. To prevent grid collapse, operators impose blackouts, keeping hospitals and critical services alive while homes go dark.
At a coal-fired power plant hit repeatedly, shift foreman Yuriy wades through charred wreckage of cars, collapsed roofs, and control panels melted into useless lumps. Repairs are carried out with torches, giant sandbags that protect what still works. Photos of colleagues killed at work hang near the entrance.
“After the missile and drone attacks, the consequences are terrible – on a large scale,” he said.
Officials asked that the location of the factory and Yuriy’s full name not be disclosed for security reasons.
“Our energy equipment was destroyed. It’s expensive,” Yuriy said. “Right now, we’re restoring what we can.”
Ukraine’s energy sector has suffered more than $20 billion in direct war damage, according to a joint estimate by the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations.
Kyiv has repeatedly updated its austere winter energy-saving program, dimming or cutting street lights in low-traffic areas and investing in less centralized power generation.
In tower blocks, restoration feels far away.
“I’m tired, very tired, to be honest. When you can’t go outside, when you don’t see the sun, when there’s no light and you can’t even go to the store alone… It makes you tired,” Bachurina said.
“But the important thing, as all Ukrainians say now, is that we will endure anything until the end of the war.”
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Associated Press writers Susie Blann and Dan Bashakov contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine