“Help me! I’m freezing to death!” — an 87-year-old woman screaming from a Kyiv balcony during blackouts.
Writer James Meek returns to Kyiv after 3 decades and finds a city surviving winter strikes, cold apartments, and exhausted people, The Guardian. 1/
“A Russian attack two nights earlier” tore up the grid. Even places with generators lost water.
Kyiv keeps getting patched up, then hit again — power, heating, water, repeat. 2/
A young photographer tells him she once saw a Russian drone operator’s POV locked onto her car — then it veered away.
Different scale of risk. People still take the lift when a foreigner hesitates. 3/
Kyiv looks normal until you notice the war’s fingerprints.
Billboards recruiting for brigades. Sirens mid-commute. Generators on streets. The exhaustion shows on faces in the metro. 4/
On the left bank, Soviet-era utilities fail hardest after strikes.
“The only real defense” against missiles is Patriot — expensive US interceptors — while Russia floods the sky with cheap targets and saturates air defense. 5/
Alla, 79, eats hot kasha in a heated municipal tent. Her building was hit by a downed drone.
A neighbour, already grieving family, heard her grandson was missing, had a stroke, then died in the fire: “calling for help” while gas fed the flames. 6/
Broneslava, 87, lived alone on the 8th floor with no heat, no power, no lift, no food, no money.
Police: nothing. Paramedics: nothing. They took her to hospital anyway — the room so cold “I felt the frost grip my toes.” 7/
Another front runs through the same city: demolition and speculative building.
A campaigner compares new Kyiv architecture to “a spaceship, a medieval castle and a toy car. Built into a vinaigrette.” Developers build, cash out, leave. 8/
“Nobody builds in Kyiv for the future now,” he says.
And still cafés run on generators, neighbors pool money for giant batteries, people stay. “Just staying here is like taking part in this war.” 9X
Source: theguardian.com/world/2026/feb…
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