Russia unleashed a combined missile and drone barrage on Ukraine early today, knocking out power and heat to thousands of homes in Kyiv as temperatures plunged, Ukrainian officials said. One person was killed in the wider Kyiv region and at least one was wounded in the capital, where debris also damaged a school and disrupted water supplies on the city’s left bank.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said heating was cut to 5,635 multistory apartment buildings across the city of more than 3 million. The outage hit as the mercury fell to minus 15 C (5 F), intensifying the immediate risk to residents in frigid conditions. Klitschko said 80% of the buildings affected today had already been hit during a previous strike earlier this month, underscoring the strain on the capital’s battered energy system despite round-the-clock repairs.
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Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the barrage “a wake-up call” to world leaders gathering in Davos, saying urgent air defenses, interceptors and additional energy support are needed to protect civilians and keep the grid functioning. “Thousands of houses are without heating in Kyiv at -15C outside,” he wrote on X, warning that sustained strikes are eroding critical infrastructure faster than it can be restored.
Regional authorities reported broader damage beyond the capital. In the wider Kyiv region, one person was killed and two petrol stations were damaged, officials said. Attacks also struck energy and other critical infrastructure in the Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava and Sumy regions, according to Sybiha. In the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a production facility was hit and two people were wounded, local officials said.
The shelling forced Kyiv’s parliamentary support office to work remotely today due to a lack of water and heating in its building, lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak of the Holos party said on Telegram. No parliamentary sessions were scheduled.
United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk condemned the strikes as “cruel,” saying they have severed heating to hundreds of thousands of families and disproportionately endanger children and older people as temperatures drop below freezing. “Targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure is a clear breach of the rules of warfare,” Turk said in a statement read by a spokesperson in Geneva. “I call on the Russian authorities to immediately cease these attacks.”
The Kremlin maintains it targets only Ukrainian military facilities. But Ukraine and international monitors say repeated long-range strikes have consistently hit power plants, substations, water systems and other civilian infrastructure, triggering rolling blackouts and complicating repairs during winter.
Today’s barrage deepens a weeks-long campaign against Ukraine’s energy grid and comes as the war approaches its four-year mark. Previous salvos this month left Kyiv coping with severe power and heating outages. Utility crews have worked around the clock to patch lines and restore service, but officials say the pace and scale of strikes have widened the gaps in the system faster than they can be closed.
Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have yielded no tangible results so far, even amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump on both Kyiv and Moscow. Ukraine’s leadership argues that bolstering air defense coverage—particularly with modern interceptors—remains the most immediate way to protect civilians and keep the country’s power and heating networks from collapse under sustained attack.
With temperatures expected to remain low, Kyiv authorities urged residents to conserve electricity, use designated warming centers if needed and follow official guidance as repairs continue citywide. Water service on parts of the left bank remained disrupted, and damage assessments were ongoing across districts hit by falling debris.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
