Last on Wednesday, almost 12 million Ukrainian households were without electricity. On Friday, the situation was significantly better, when there were only more than six million homes without electricity.
But who knows how Saturday would end in Kiev, Sunday would start in Odessa, or if you would have to trudge through the next week anywhere in the country?
Russians repeated and deliberate attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have made life unpredictable for civilians across Ukraine. In some places, there is a battle for life and death, and even in the better spared areas, you have to be prepared for the fact that you will soon have to know how to live like people several generations ago.
“According to the authorities, we have lost 80 percent of our energy. One bigger strike with missiles, and we will sink into complete darkness,” said the 28-year-old media worker Jelyzaveta Kovtun on Saturday on the phone from the capital, Kyiv.
Kovtu is referred to by the president to Volodymyr Zelensky to the announcement that Russia’s major attack with 70 missiles on Wednesday had temporarily interrupted the distribution of water and electricity in about 80 percent of the country.
Since then, the systems have been repaired and returned to operation in many places. The International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA said on Friday that all the nuclear power plants owned by the Ukrainians had been reconnected to the country’s electricity grid, from which they had been disconnected after the missile strikes.
The people of Kyiv filled water bottles at the pump well on Thursday.
I’m getting sick recalls a discussion in his neighborhood a couple of weeks ago about which of the neighbors might know how to chop wood and make a fire. Such skills are not self-evident in the modern metropolis, which was home to around three million people before the war.
According to him, however, there is a fighting spirit in power and he has not noticed any panic. When ATMs travel, cash is used. When your own shower stops working, your friends open their door.
“The war has been going on for nine months and this is just another phase that we have to endure. People still work and get married and go to the dentist. We also eat in restaurants, even by candlelight,” he says.
According to Kovtun, who has done news work with international journalists in different parts of the country, the atmosphere of collusion is strong throughout Ukraine. Stores invite people to charge their cell phones and different companies spread information about where to get drinking water if someone has lost electricity, water, or both.
Kovtun says that power outages have also lowered temperatures in district heating apartments, because the circulation pumps stop pumping warm water to radiators. He says that the temperature in his apartment building has been around 15-16 degrees for the past few days.
“People buy candles and put more socks on their feet. This is a difficult situation, but we will get through it. Ukrainians will not give up,” he says.
Rita Burkovska adopted a Bels dog in the town of Butša last April.
in Kiev resident actor Rita Burkovska32, said in a WhatsApp conversation on Saturday morning that he has to wake up early in the morning to do his laundry, charge his cell phone and use the internet before the electricity goes out.
Currently, electricity is only available for 5-6 hours a day, at least in his area of residence in the city center.
“In 29 minutes they will cut off the electricity,” Burkovska said at 9:31 in the morning and sent a screenshot of the mobile phone app that tells about it.
On Wednesday, the water was also cut off from his house for a day as a result of one of the fiercest bombings of the war. Burkovska sends a photo of her dog Bels, with two bowls filled with snow in the background.
Bels-dog with trays filled with snow behind him in case of water breaks.
Question a male dog of the Bels breed (mixed breed) leads the conversation to the side tracks for a moment about the energy crisis, but not about other sufferings experienced by Ukrainians. At the beginning of last April, Burkovska visited the city of Butša with her photographer friend, and on that trip she adopted Bels, who wandered the streets of the city alone.
Butcha is the infamous town west of Kyiv where Russian soldiers tortured and killed possibly hundreds of civilians before abandoning the town after about a month of occupation.
By chance, Burkovska’s dog Bels ended up in a photo that spread widely around the world, where a local resident was lying dead next to his bicycle on the side of the road. Bels was resting next to the body in the photo.
The photo released by the Reuters photo agency on April 3 shows an adopted Bels dog next to a dead city dweller.
When talking about Butša, Burkovska tells a macabre and unpublishable joke about Russians, for which she immediately apologizes. According to him, it is survival humor, with which Ukrainians try to withstand the stress caused by the war.
We try to get through the colder and colder winter with humor.
“Our life has become more romantic when we do everything by candlelight. Without electricity, without water, without heating, but above all without Russians – that’s our slogan,” says Burkovska.
People sat by candlelight in a restaurant in Lviv, western Ukraine, on Friday evening.
Burkovska says that in the midst of their own difficulties, it is good for the people of Kyiv to keep in mind that there are completely or almost completely destroyed villages and towns in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, where things are still much worse.
“There is nothing there. How do people and animals survive there? Many cities and villages are still under fire and there is no possibility to do renovation work there.”
Kovtun and Burkovska, who were interviewed for the story, have both assisted Helsingin Sanomat journalists and photographers working in Ukraine over the past months.
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