Winter has not been cancelled. Russia is preparing another campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has said so openly.
“In response to strikes against Russia, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have been instructed to prepare and carry out massive strikes against Ukraine’s energy facilities,” Putin said, adding: “If they strike us, they will receive a response.”
For Ukrainians, this means preparing once again for blackouts, disrupted transport, and the loss of basic comforts as temperatures fall. But after years of war, Ukraine is no longer facing winter as it did in 2022. An entire system of survival has developed, and Ukrainians have learned how to keep their cities going when the lights go out.
Ukrainians should therefore prepare for continued attacks on their energy infrastructure. In fact, they are used to it.
Putin has openly announced preparations for massive strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities, calling them a response to Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s fuel and energy infrastructure. And Russian forces are indeed increasingly targeting energy facilities and other infrastructure on which the normal life of Ukrainian cities depends. The United Nations has documented that during the winter of 2025-26, Russian forces systematically attacked electricity generation, transmission, and distribution facilities, often using hundreds of weapons in coordinated attacks; emergency blackouts at times affected millions of people.
A complete blackout has so far been avoided. Equipment supplied to Ukraine by international partners, backup systems, and distributed generation all help, as does the fact that Ukrainian energy workers have learned to repair damage extremely quickly. But constant breakdowns that directly disrupt civilian life have become a normal part of reality in Ukraine. After strikes, urban electric transport may not run in the morning, suburban trains may stop, intercity trains may be delayed, sometimes for many hours, and during an air raid, passengers may be let off right in the middle of a field. Even in Kyiv, recent Russian strikes on energy and transport facilities have caused serious disruptions to the functioning of the city.
In this way, Putin, seeking to inflict maximum suffering on Ukraine’s civilian population, is trying to compensate for his limited gains on the battlefield. At the same time, Russian propaganda sometimes gets so far ahead of reality that the Kremlin has to correct itself.
For example, in his statements about the settlement of Kozacha Lopan, near Kharkiv, Putin gave different distances to it, and later the Russian side claimed to have captured it. This was not true — Ukrainian forces retained control of the settlement, while fighting continued in the area. Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation specifically refuted Putin’s claims that Kozacha Lopan had been captured.
But the Russians are not “fighting” only the Ukrainian army there. They are fighting the local population.
Russian soldiers destroyed my acquaintance’s house with a tank. I had previously helped relocate him within the Kharkiv region. They killed his grandmother because she asked for water, and took away the grain that people were supposed to sow in the spring. This reminds Ukrainians of another experience of Russia’s war against the peasantry: the Holodomor (Great Famine) of 1932-33, when the Soviet authorities confiscated food and condemned people to death by starvation. According to current demographic estimates by Ukrainian and American researchers, excess deaths from the famine in Ukraine amounted to about 3.9 million people, while the overall demographic losses, including unborn children, amounted to about 4.5 million.
That is why a saying has remained among the Ukrainian population ever since: “Ukrainians survived the Holodomor, so they will survive this too.” But now we are talking about a war that has already entered its fifth year, and in particular about the coming winter, which Ukrainians will once again have to survive. Will they? How are they preparing? What experience do they have?
I remember how, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, all the food suddenly disappeared from shop shelves, people bought up the supplies, and then came the first blackout, followed by a second one that lasted more than a day. The curfew at that time lasted until 3 p.m., and I drove around Kharkiv with an assistant looking for flour to make bread for people and searching for a supplier willing to provide it.
That same day, there was a Russian airborne assault in Kharkiv. Russian tanks were already on the outskirts of the city, including Saltivka, and we were risking our lives to obtain food that was both expensive and essential to people. Meanwhile, displaced people whom we were trying to accommodate wherever we could stood outside with cups in their hands, queuing at a makeshift fire that someone had built from chairs, like in photographs from 1942, simply to have some hot tea.
Life became more or less normal again later, but that experience is not forgotten. So when I am in the suburbs helping displaced people, I always tell homeowners who ask what to do with the trees they have cut down: This is your gold reserve for the winter, whatever energy assistance we may have. It cannot hurt. And I tell people about my grandmother, who survived two famines, in 1933 and 1947, saving only two of her eight children. For the rest of her life, until her death in the 1970s, she kept bags of dried bread in the pantry. They reminded her of the Holodomor, and at the same time, were ready to save the family from starvation once again.
Of course, the situation in the energy sector has changed in 2026. The survival system that has developed over the years of war has led to equipment reserves being created, physical and engineering protection of energy facilities being strengthened, distributed generation being developed, and emergency crews learning to restore damaged networks in the shortest possible time. In 2026 alone, the government allocated 12.85 billion hryvnia (about $285 million) for initial measures to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure, including 3.5 billion hryvnia (about $78 million) to protect 24 high-voltage substations. More than 67 billion hryvnia (about $1.49 billion) has been allocated overall under the resilience plans.
Preparations for the new heating season have already included 2,582 boiler houses, almost 3,000 kilometers of heating networks, and more than 1,000 central heating substations. The government has also allocated another 5 billion hryvnia (about $111 million) to develop distributed heat generation — modular boiler houses and modernization of heating systems. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, for example, more than 50 MW of distributed generation was planned, while in Kharkiv, Poltava, and Donetsk regions, 660 critical infrastructure facilities were to be protected against attacks.
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Energy workers also have experience that they did not have at the beginning of the war. In January 2026, following massive attacks, more than 15,000 specialists worked around the clock to restore the energy system, while international assistance supplied generators, transformers, cables, and other equipment. Ukraine has already received such assistance from more than 30 countries.
But none of this means that winter will be easy. On the contrary, Russia has announced a new campaign of strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in advance, while Ukraine is entering winter after years of systematic destruction of its generating capacity. Ukrainians have already survived last winter. This time, they are facing it much better prepared with generators, supplies, shelters, backup heating sources, repair experience, and, above all, an understanding that survival during wartime is not an emergency lasting a few days, but part of everyday life that requires people to be prepared every day.
Igor Bondar is a Ukrainian writer and columnist based in Kharkiv. He has been publishing regularly for over four years, with a focus on culture, politics, and the intersection of war and society. His columns appear in major Scandinavian newspapers, including Aftenposten and Klassekampen, where he writes about Ukraine’s cultural and political landscape during wartime.