Over 600,000 residents fled Kyiv in about two weeks after Russian missile and drone attacks destroyed much of its energy infrastructure, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Kyiv faces its worst crisis since the opening weeks of Russia’s invasion, with repeated Russian strikes on its energy grid leaving a majority of residents without power. The situation has been made all the worse by a cold spell, sending temperatures down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Klitschko told the Times of London that 600,000 residents fled in January alone out of a prewar population of just under 3 million. He urged the rest of the capital’s residents to follow suit.
“Leave if you can,” he warned residents.
“The situation is critical with basic services — heating, water, electricity. Right now, 5,600 apartment buildings are without heating,” Klitschko added.
He accused Russia of trying to “make a humanitarian catastrophe in our hometown, to make people freeze during the winter.”
After recent attacks damaged Kyiv’s energy grid, Klitschko said authorities had drained the city’s centralized heating and water system to prevent the freezing water from bursting the pipes.
Kyiv’s population has fluctuated wildly throughout the war, plummeting from just under 3 million to under 1 million in March 2022, then shooting up to 3.6 million in December 2022, Klitschko told Der Spiegel at the time.
Three years of continuous and growing drone and missile strikes have steadily chipped away at that total, but the current population of Kyiv is unknown. The massive figure of 600,000 leaving over just the past month and the deteriorating state of the capital signal that it could be at its lowest point yet.
Russia began its attritional strategy against Ukraine’s energy grid in the fall of 2022, as the war shifted into an attritional struggle all across the front line. Russia has vastly expanded its drone and missile capabilities since then, growing increasingly effective.
One of Russia’s greatest successes over the past year has been this energy grid campaign, with swarms of long-range suicide Geran drones and various kinds of missiles degrading Ukraine’s air defenses and wreaking havoc on the country’s infrastructure. An Institute for Science and International Security report found a massive increase in successful Geran strikes throughout 2025, with the average successful hit going from 3.42% in January to 18.67% in October. Some strike waves reached an unprecedentedly successful hit rate of 50% to 60%.
A report from Ukraine’s general staff found that in the three months before August 2024, Russia launched a total of 1,100 drones. It escalated over the ensuing three months to 818 in August 2024, 1,410 in September 2024, and over 2,000 in October 2024. By May, the number was over 4,000, and it never dipped below 4,000 per month for the rest of the year. An analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security noted a peak in July, with 6,297 launches in total. A renewed winter campaign has seen thousands of drones and hundreds of missiles batter energy infrastructure across the country since temperatures began to drop.
Even worse for the Ukrainians has been the increase in the quality of Geran drones. The increasing adoption of jets on the drones, fortifying them against electronic warfare through the integration of measures such as 16‑element CRPA antennas and the integration of live cameras and modems to allow for evasive maneuvers, has made the drones much more effective at evading air defenses and much more destructive.
All of these developments have made Ukraine unable to repair its energy grid faster than Russia can destroy it, unlike in the past. This has deprived many major cities, such as Kyiv, of running water, with some residents finding they couldn’t use their toilets because the water had frozen in the bowl.
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Experts warned that the crippling of the sewage system could create an unprecedented crisis in Ukraine, shutting down cities and spreading diseases.
“Water is the key. If the Russians continue to prevent the supply of water to such a huge city, it creates the risk of a complete collapse,” Taras Zahorodniy, head of the National Anti-Crisis Group, told the Times. “People can’t wash, cook, or clean.”