One evening this winter, we saw the numbers drop: -18C (zero F) overnight. That was all we needed to know. Cold does not arrive alone here. When the temperature falls that sharply, something else usually comes first. The missiles. The drones. More blackouts. And that night, exactly as expected, they did.
This is how war reads sometimes: not in headlines and someone’s statements, but in weather forecasts.
The new Russian hypersonic ballistic Oreshnik missile was launched that night for only the second time. When the alert came, I moved into the hallway (to avoid flying glass shards) with my seven-year-old son and my two shelter dogs.
I live next to the government building in Kyiv, so I thought the missile was coming for us. I wrote to a friend, something between a joke and a farewell — that it had been nice living here — and I put some music on. We listened to Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World. Wartime Ukraine offers a warm welcome to irony when imminent death comes calling.
A few minutes later, it turned out the missile had delivered its payload of misery to another part of our country, near the Polish border. It transpired there had been no massive explosion; it was fired without its warhead, and so was just another test of something new, something designed to frighten as much as to destroy. My fear pivoted, and I started writing to friends there: Are you okay? Are you safe?
Meanwhile, Kyiv slid into its now-familiar darkness. Only this time, it was not just about electricity. The central heating went down, too. The Mayor advised people who could leave the city for a few days to do so. But I watched videos of cars stuck on snowed-in highways. I had planned to escape to a tiny cabin in the woods with a stove in such a situation, but instead, I stayed in my apartment. Freezing at home felt safer than freezing on a road.
There is a sentence I read earlier this winter that I cannot shake: “It’s scary when it’s cold at home.” Not outside the window. Not in a far-off forest. At home.
Cold at home is not just a temperature. It is a violation. Homes are supposed to be safe. This is where walls and radiators and routines hold the cold and danger at bay. When that collapses, it marks a descent into something deeply primitive.
We have learned to survive it the way Ukrainians always do: through improvised physics and collective folklore. Put a candle by the window; it warms the air that sneaks through. Hang thick blankets over the glass. If you are lucky enough to have gas, keep the stove on. Keep cooking something, keep the oven warm. Don’t roam the apartment. Pick one room. Gather everyone there. Humans, dogs, steam from boiling pots — it all adds up to a few degrees of survival.
I set up a tent on my bed and crawled inside with my child and the pets. We slept in sleeping bags, like campers in a city that had separated from civilization.
And still, the next morning, after another night of drones and explosions targeting our energy system, we did something very Kyivan. We walked across the street to the bakery to buy cinnamon rolls. Because I was certain it would be open. It was a moment of faith. No electricity. No heating. An hour of power at best. Missiles in the sky. And yet: there would be coffee, and there would be cinnabons (and there were!)
This is also why narratives about Ukrainians “becoming war weary” or “needing to compromise” misunderstand something fundamental.
We are not enduring this because we are numb. We are enduring it because we know what is being tested.
When energy facilities are hit right before the coldest nights, when millions of people are left without heat and light in subzero temperatures, it does something more than interrupt daily work. It enters bedrooms. It crawls into children’s beds. It seeps into lungs, and joints, and fear. It is coldly calculated to make the home feel unsafe.
I will not speculate about motives. I do not need to. I only need to describe the pattern: the timing, the targets, the result. The result is a civilian population calculating survival in kilowatts and degrees, choosing between freezing in apartments or freezing in traffic, building tents on beds, and heating rooms with candles.
And yet, even inside that engineered cold, we keep choosing how to live. We play music. We go to the movies that run on diesel generators and are stopped during air raids. We adopt dogs. We fall in love. We plan futures.
Not because we are naive. But because surrender would mean that even our cold homes would no longer belong to us.
If freezing is the price of staying free, we will freeze with dignity: wrapped in blankets, holding dogs while eating cinnabons in the dark.
And we will keep the music on.
Lera Burlakova is a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary, Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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