Nine-year-old Artem Panchenko helps his grandmother stoke a smoky fire in a makeshift outdoor kitchen beside their nearly abandoned apartment block. The light is falling fast and they need to eat before the setting sun plunges their home into cold and darkness.
Winter is coming. They can feel it in their bones as temperatures drop below freezing. And like tens of thousands of other Ukrainians, they are facing a season that promises to be brutal.
Artem and his grandmother have been living without gas, water or electricity for around three weeks, ever since Russian missile strikes cut off the utilities in their town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region. For them and the few other residents that remain in the complex in Kivsharivka, bundling up at night and cooking outdoors is the only way to survive.
“It’s cold and there are bombings,” Artem said Sunday as he helped his grandmother with the cooking. “It’s really cold. I’m sleeping in my clothes in our apartment.”
More Russian strikes on Monday in Kyiv, the capital, and other Ukrainian cities by drones and missiles that targeted power plants have added to the general sense of foreboding about the coming winter.
As the freeze sets in, those who haven’t fled from the heavy fighting, regular shelling and months of Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine are desperately trying to figure out how to dig in for the cold months.
In the nearby village of Kurylivka, Viktor Palyanitsa pushes a wheelbarrow full of freshly cut logs along the road toward his house. He passes a destroyed tank, the remnants of damaged buildings and the site of a 300-year-old wooden church that was leveled as Ukrainian forces fought to liberate the area from Russian occupiers.
Palyanitsa, 37, said he’s gathered enough wood to last the entire winter. Still, he planned to begin sleeping beside a wood-burning stove in a rickety outbuilding and not his home, since all the windows in his house have been blown out by flying shrapnel.
“It’s not comfortable. We spend a lot of time on gathering wood. You can see the situation we’re living in,” Palyanitsa said, quietly understating the dire outlook for the next several months.
Authorities are working to gradually restore electricity to the area in the coming days, and repairs to water and gas infrastructure will come next, according to Roman Semenukha, a deputy with the Kharkiv regional government.
“Only after that will we be able to begin to restore heating,” he said.
Authorities were working to provide firewood to residents, he added, but had no timeline for when the utilities would be restored.
Standing beside his pile of split wood, Palyanitsa was not waiting for government help. He said he didn’t expect heating to be restored anytime soon, but that he feels ready to fend for himself even once winter sets in.
“I have arms and legs. So I’m not scared of the cold, because I can find wood and heat the stove,” he said.