Defiance in the dark: Ukrainians improvise to thwart Putin’s power cuts

Winter power cuts have become the Kremlin’s devastating new weapon against Ukraine, but the owner of Brooks, a large, fashionable restaurant in the central city of Dnipro, is stubbornly defiant. So are his staff and diners.

“I don’t like problems, I like big challenges,” Oleksandr Varava declared at about 6pm on Friday night. Seconds later there was a loud “oooh” as the lights went out. Within a few moments, however, the serving staff were carrying torches and putting giant candles on the tables and lanterns on the wall. In the kitchen, the chefs attached torches to their chests.

The guests, meanwhile, carried on looking at phones, laptops and each other, apparently unperturbed. “We are Ukrainian and I can’t even describe how proud we are,” Varava said.

Dnipro, a city of one million people close to the worst of the fighting in the east of the country has nonetheless largely remained a safe haven by Ukrainian standards, sustaining only sporadic damage — most recently yesterday, when rockets hit a residential district, injuring six people.

Varava began preparing for power cuts in September, after Russian missiles struck the centre of the city. He bought a massive 130kW diesel generator and installed one large tank for drinking water and another for washing-up.

 “We’re not doing this to make money, we’re doing it for people — not just for guests, so they have somewhere to come, but for our employees, so they have a full salary,” he said.

A wood-fired pizza oven has been set up in the car park for cooking without power and a DJ who had travelled 300 miles from Kyiv was setting up his decks. His overhead lights shone a greenish- yellow with glow-in-the-dark paint.

Across Ukraine there is a similar determination to thwart Vladimir Putin’s efforts to “weaponise winter” by squeezing the country’s energy infrastructure.

The Russians staged their most serious attacks to date on the power grid last week, apparently in retaliation for Ukraine’s liberation of the southern city of Kherson a fortnight ago, after months of Russian occupation. Yesterday, the Ukrainian authorities continued gradually to restore power across the country, helped by the reconnection of the country’s four nuclear plants. Wednesday was the first time in 40 years that all four were simultaneously shut down.

Conditions remain grim, however: in his nightly address, President Zelensky said six million households in a nation of just over 40 million people were still without power. Temperatures in Kyiv and other parts of the country are set to sink below zero from the middle of this week.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, America’s envoy to the UN, said last week that President Putin was “clearly weaponising winter to inflict immense suffering on the Ukrainian people”.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, described Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure as “war crimes [that] cannot go unpunished”.

Zelensky yesterday marked the anniversary of the Holodomor — the 1930s famine blamed on the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that killed an estimated 3.5 million people in Ukraine — by hosting a summit on food security and agricultural exports with the prime ministers of Belgium, Poland and Lithuania and the president of Hungary.

Moscow has shifted tactics in recent weeks: while Russian soldiers struggle on the battlefield against Ukrainian forces armed with growing quantities of sophisticated American equipment, Putin is increasingly targeting civilians.

“Without electricity, especially in the winter time, it could be a complete collapse of all of the system,” Oleksandr Danylyuk, an adviser on defence and intelligence to the government in Kyiv, told the BBC yesterday. “And this is exactly what Russia is trying to achieve.”

Putin also appears determined to trigger a new wave of millions of Ukrainian refugees emigrating westwards, putting strain on European countries’ infrastructure in the hope of weakening popular support for Kyiv’s cause and adding to pressure to negotiate a peace.

About eight million Ukrainians left the country in the first few weeks after the invasion on February 24, but many returned during the summer. Danylyuk warned that Russian pressure on the grid could now generate a “new wave, and I am I afraid that it could be even bigger”.

To the Kremlin’s apparent dismay, western governments have so far shown remarkable unity in the face of Russian aggression. Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, said last week that the alliance’s foreign ministers would agree at a meeting in Bucharest, starting on Tuesday, to increase the shipments of power generators, clothing and other non-lethal items to Ukraine to help it withstand the onslaught.

Yet opinion polls show signs of “Ukraine fatigue”, especially in Germany, France and Italy, amid surging gas and electricity bills caused by Russian cuts to energy exports in retaliation for western sanctions.

Any hardship suffered in Britain or elsewhere in Europe, however, pales beside the suffering in Ukraine, where power cuts are wrecking the economy and disrupting life for tens of millions of people — even those far from the fighting.

In the port city of Odesa, hundreds of miles from the front line, residents have been hit by unexpected outages. Oleksandra, 38, who lives with her husband, Serhii, 32, and their 15-month-old daughter, Lana, in a modern 16-floor tower block, has no light, heat or even water when the power goes off, because the pump is electric. “It’s really difficult with a small baby,” she said.

The couple also have to trudge up and down ten floors because they are afraid of getting stuck in the lift in a power cut.

In Lyiv, in the far west of the country, power cuts that last several hours a day are common. Conditions in Kyiv, home to almost three million people before the invasion, are even worse. Zelensky used his broadcast on Friday night to criticise Vitali Klitschko, the former boxer turned mayor, for poor provision of emergency shelters.

Many residents had been without power “for 20 or even 30 hours” in recent days, Zelensky said, adding: “There are a lot of complaints in Kyiv. To put it mildly, more work is needed.”

Kateryna Danilchenko, 35, who lives with her husband and five-year-old son about 15 minutes from the centre, does not blame Klitschko, but says it was tough to be without power from 2pm on Wednesday till 10pm the following day.

“There was an attack, we heard an explosion and 20 minutes later everything went totally black,” she said.

“It’s only November. The temperature outside now is plus one. But Kyiv gets very cold and we are afraid of what it will be like when it’s minus five or minus ten.

 “People are becoming very depressed with all these power cuts. People are trying to be as positive as possible, but it’s very challenging in these conditions.”