Kyiv is no longer a city that merely endures nighttime attacks. Since late August 2024, Russia has shifted to daylight drone and missile strikes, deploying new jet-powered drones that are faster and harder to intercept. Warehouses, petrol stations, and the Lukyanivka shopping complex have been hit. The capital is now, functionally, a frontline city — and its residents know what comes next. What comes next is winter, and Kyiv's residents have recent, visceral memory of what that means. Last year temperatures plunged to minus 20°C. When Russian strikes knocked out power infrastructure, indoor temperatures in some flats dropped to 3°C. Illustrator Sergiy Maidukov kept warm by doing push-ups and going for runs. Film-maker Iryna Tsilyk raised the question nobody in Western capitals has to ask: what happens to the elderly and infirm when heating, water, and internet all fail simultaneously? The details of survival are granular and undignified. Editor Maria Shuvalova describes a period two winters ago when water supply failed at both her flat and her coworking space for several days. She walked 20 minutes home to urinate in a bottle, then returned to work. Bowel movements went into plastic bags. These are the lived realities of a European capital under sustained infrastructure attack — not the sanitized version that reaches Western news cycles. Shuvalova is now pregnant and preparing for winter with plans A, B, and C. She and her husband — currently serving in the army — bought an energy-storage battery (effectively a giant power bank the size of a carry-on suitcase) for roughly 80,000 UAH, half the 160,000 UAH winter price, about £1,350. Their apartment block is voting on self-management to install a generator for one lift and a toilet in the underground car park that doubles as a bomb shelter. Anti-natal classes emphasize breastfeeding because formula requires clean water and the ability to heat it — neither guaranteed. The response patterns reveal a city that has developed layered resilience through bitter experience. Nastya Dyakova, CEO of an online safety charity, has rented a seven-bedroom house in the Carpathian mountains as a six-month staff refuge. Market traders in Lukyanivka set up stalls beside the bombed-out ruins of their complex. Delivery driver Viktor, relocated from Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region, is unfazed. Accountant Viktoriia Riabchenko notes that Russian propaganda exaggerates food shortage risks — specific shortfalls in shops tend to be remedied fast. The strategic calculus is stark. Russia's infrastructure targeting is designed to make Kyiv unliveable — to impose costs on civilians that erode political will. The city's decentralized survival mechanisms — personal generators, battery systems, camping stoves, dry-shower packs, horilka — represent bottom-up resilience that no central authority organized. But this resilience is unevenly distributed. Young, resourceful, employed professionals can buy batteries and rent Carpathian houses. The elderly, the poor, and the infirm face the 3°C flat with no running water and no escape plan. The emotional terrain is equally revealing. Kyivans have developed a dark humor and psychological flexibility that reads as adaptation rather than denial. Writer Myroslav Laiuk watches a drone get shot down over his prosecco picnic and calls it shooting stars. Maidukov's summary is precise: nothing will stop spring. The question for this winter is how many people, and which people, make it there.
