Here in one Kyiv apartment building, they are freezing—but not giving up

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. KYIV, Ukraine—Iryna Tkhoryk knew things were really bad in her cozy, three-room apartment here when frost formed on the inside handle of her balcony door, and she could see her own breath. The 60-year-old pet-store manager now walks around swaddled in several layers topped by a long pink hoodie, wearing four pairs of socks and a hot-water bottle around her neck to cope with temperatures that are at best around 50 degrees Fahrenheit inside and 10 degrees outside.

The situation in Tkhoryk’s apartment building on Tychyna Avenue is familiar across Kyiv and other large cities, such as Odesa and Dnipro, as four years of Russian airstrikes have devastated Ukraine’s electricity grid and disrupted heating. The strikes have left millions without electricity for most of the day and thousands of homes with heating that barely works. The situation is particularly acute in the capital, Kyiv, where blackouts had, until late last year, largely been a bearable annoyance that residents could weather with power banks, candles and battery-powered torches.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a million Kyiv residents were without power and over 4,000 apartment buildings without heating as of Tuesday evening. Kyiv authorities said about one-fifth of the city’s three million residents had fled the city this month, citing cellphone data. Authorities closed schools in the capital until February because of the energy situation.

The result, however, hasn’t been the societal collapse that Russia has long sought by attacking civilian infrastructure. Instead, Ukrainians are showing the resilience and make-do attitude that have frustrated Moscow’s efforts to pummel them into submission. Ukrainians like those