Russia-Ukraine Armed Conflict: What happens in winter when the power goes out
Iryna Shtypa describes cold as a lack of colour.
“You don’t enjoy life, you walk all huddled up, your mind doesn’t function properly,” she says.
“When it’s warm, you are fully capable of thinking, you perceive the world differently, in all its colours – rather than black and white.”
Shtypa is the deputy head of a heating company in Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine. Here, with winter temperatures dropping below zero, heating is a vital service.
To be without heating is a catastrophe. We make the lives of 170,000 people warmer.
Iryna Shtypa
With the escalation of armed conflict in February 2022, Shtypa and her husband were forced to leave their home and seek shelter. In the fighting, a boiler house – a critical piece of infrastructure in city heating systems – was destroyed.
It was April. Shtypa knew that rehabilitating a boiler house could take at least six months. The ‘heating season’ began in October. If it wasn’t fixed soon, thousands would be exposed to the bitter cold in their own homes.
But she found a way, explaining the urgent need to a humanitarian organisation that was able to help replace the boiler house just in time – this was how Shtypa first met our colleagues at the ICRC.
“We may just be a technical service,” Shtypa says, “but I believe the fact that we carry on gives hope to all the people who live here.”
In this armed conflict – from Chernihiv to Mariupol, Donetsk to Odesa – the power, heating and water systems that people rely on have faced strike after strike.
These systems are interconnected – heating systems rely on water or gas systems, while all rely on electricity. Damage to one affects another.
Some communities close to the frontlines have gone without basic services for months or years; in cities, electricity is rationed to ensure supply in winter.
“When power is supplied according to a schedule, people often have to wake up at night to start a washing machine, to iron their clothes, to dry their hair with a blow dryer, to cook,” Shtypa says. “Your life turns into a nightmare.”
Shtypa tells us that she, too, has learned to store diesel in jerrycans, chop firewood, use portable gas stoves, keep an emergency ‘grab bag’, store documents in one place and ensure reserves of medicine and water are on hand.
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