Freezing city: Ksenia Maximova about her trip to Kyiv

I arrived in Kyiv in mid-December, expecting snow. Instead, the city felt like a mild, almost pleasant autumn. For the first week and a half, I went running in Taras Shevchenko Park almost every day. I’m not a great runner, but it was manageable.

Gradually, the air grew colder. I would come back with my throat burning from breathing frozen air. Eventually, I realised I had to stop running, unless I wanted to end up in hospital with something broken, becoming a burden to the people I was working with. The pavements iced over.

At that point, Kyiv was still on a relatively bearable electricity schedule, and temperatures had not yet dropped too low. In some apartments, electricity was on for half a day and off for the other half. Then it shifted to four hours on, four hours off.

People living on the top floors had it worse than everyone else. When the electricity went out, they had to climb twenty floors on foot. Often, air defence systems were positioned right above their windows. Watching drones fly in, get shot down, or hit nearby buildings became routine. These were the people who went to bomb shelters most often. Imagine going down twenty flights of stairs in complete darkness in the middle of the night, with children, elderly relatives, cats, and dogs.

We had electricity, largely because we were lucky enough to be near several strategic buildings. As we made new friends, our flat became a constant meeting point; locals and foreigners passing through Kyiv for work or to join the army would stop by to eat, warm up, or get some work done.

We sat out the bombings and the drones, grew accustomed to the bangs, sometimes hiding in the bathroom for safety, stubbornly working until the early hours of the morning. The Russian military were waiting for the cold to become severe enough to unleash sustained attacks, so that water pipes would freeze and burst. Restoring them takes an eternity. There is something deeply unsettling about an entire city feeling like a giant sitting duck. Every person feels like one. Eventually, everything froze, fully and finally. Tree branches were coated in ice, beautiful in their own way, yet a constant, visible manifestation of the terrifying cold.

We still had heating and electricity, which mattered most. But with one strike after another, light in Kyiv grew scarcer. We began experiencing outages, too. The worst part was not being on an official schedule, never knowing what to expect. You charge every device frantically while there is electricity, conserve battery as much as possible, and charge again wherever you can around the city. Then you wake up in the morning, see your own breath in the room, and realise the heating has been off for hours.

In my last days in Kyiv, it was dark and cold almost all the time. I had a meeting in my flat and struggled to hold a meaningful conversation, I could barely see the other person’s face in the flickering candlelight, and I was so cold I could hardly focus.

Ukrainians are remarkable people. Incredibly resilient, even when exhausted. They rotate within their social circles, inviting one another over for a hot shower, a meal, or even a place to sleep. But I also witnessed panic attacks, tears, and desperation. Here are some of the things people told me:

“The power was cut at 7p.m. Now they turn it on and off without any schedule, unexpectedly. You can get stuck in an elevator. It’s hard to call the elevator service — the line is busy. When my mum got stuck recently, I couldn’t reach the elevator operators at all. We got out on our own, forcing the doors open.”

“The electricity is turned off for at least 12 hours. You never know when it will come back on or when it will be cut again. The 20th floor: the heating, water, and electric stove stop working. The Wi-Fi doesn’t hold even with a 30000 power bank, and mobile service lags. And you feel like you’re falling into a dark funnel of thoughts — depression hits, it feels like things will only get worse, nothing ahead but exhaustion and cold. Without electricity, everything freezes. With electricity, you want to live again.”

I left, and left all of them behind. It feels deeply strange to be back in my warm, comfortable home, able to run a hot bath and make myself a cup of tea, while the people I spent so much time side-by-side with are surviving below-zero temperatures, risking their lives.

That is the reality people are living through right now. We are raising funds for generators so schools and hospitals don’t lose power when the grid goes down. Please donate. This support keeps critical services running.