Candlelight dinners that showed me Putin’s bid to freeze Ukrainians into submission is doomed to fail
A year after their first dispatches from Kyiv, our team return to a city where life has utterly changed but patriotic spirit remains unbroken
WE EAT our dinner by Putinlight — guttering candles on the table and iPhone torches in the kitchen. The mains electricity had snapped off at 8pm, just as we and thousands of other households were sitting down to eat.
Outside, the temperature is double figures below zero. Fresh snow showers are expected. But no one is put out. They know to wear extra layers, to cook early or days in advance, stay at home and be alert for sirens signalling the next Russian missile barrage.
‘I’d rather sit here in the cold and darkness than under occupation by Putin,’ my host says. Such is the reality of wartime Kyiv in this newly minted, but no less frightening, year of 2023.
Having driven eight hours from Poland, we reach the Ukrainian capital to be met by a Stygian gloom. The blue and yellow illuminations on the giant Christmas tree in St Sophia’s Square twinkle patriotically. But many of the urban districts we pass seem lifeless.
Certainly, they are underlit; as we approach one inner city neighbourhood, it plunges into darkness — like a scene from a sci-fi film. Kyiv’s chaotic traffic junctions have to be negotiated with care at the best of times. Now many of the red ‘stop’ signals have ceased to function.
And these times are not the best.
After almost 12 months of reporting this war, this city had begun to feel like a second home for Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and me. But since we were here last, in the autumn, life has undergone another transformation.
From late February until early April, Kyiv was under siege by ground forces. Putin’s barbarians were at the gates, in the devastated satellite suburbs of Bucha, Irpin and Hostomel.
Then, against all expert expectation, the Russian advance was forced to retreat. By summer, most of the barricades and anti-tank obstacles installed to block Kyiv’s streets against enemy tanks were removed.
The nearest active frontlines were hundreds of miles away. Something like ‘normal life’ resumed and so one of Europe’s most vibrant cities should have been able to properly celebrate this week’s Orthodox Christmas season.
Instead, its citizens endure a different kind of warfare. Having failed to capture Kyiv — and other large cities — the Kremlin is using the bitter winter to try to break civilian morale.
Since October, Russia has launched cruise missiles and Iranian-manufactured ‘suicide’ drones at civilian- orientated
‘critical infrastructure’, such as electricity and water supplies.
The results have been devastating — in the short-term — with access to lighting, heating and water denied to millions for up to a week at a time, as engineers battle to repair the damage.
And, when the systems are up and running, the Russians strike again: 11 countrywide bombardments so far. The Kremlin wants the Ukrainian people to freeze; to cease to endure and urge their government to the negotiating table.
Today the electricity grid for Kyiv is operating at a fraction of capacity. Supply is being husbanded; hence the regularly controlled blackouts.
A friend quips that Ukraine can endure as long as there is a schedule. This is no better demonstrated than by an app on my phone for the north Kyiv residential district of Obolon.
It tells me that today, when temperatures will not rise above freezing, power will be cut off entirely from 6- 9am and 3-6pm. There will also likely be blackouts from 3-5am, midday to 2pm and 9pm to midnight.
So is Putin close to breaking the people’s spirit?
In a two-room flat on the tenth floor of a Soviet era apartment block, I get some indication of the wider mood.
Anatolii and Nadia are retired engineers in their 70s.
They’ve been trying to make the best of the festive season. A small, artificial Christmas tree, a nativity scene on a bookcase and various baubles hang from net curtains.
The couple have a grandstand view of missile attacks — and air defence efforts — at a power station only four miles away.
‘Often there are no lights,’ Anatolii tells me. ‘But such hardships are nothing compared to what our soldiers are going through.’
‘After all this festive eating, it does me good to walk up the stairs,’ Nadia remarks.
Anatolii has been salvaging lithium battery cells from obsolete laptops to power lamps. The price of torch batteries and battery-powered transistor radios has gone up five-fold.
How do they cope when the power cuts see them stuck on the tenth floor during an attack?
‘We hope for the best and shelter in the bathroom,’ says Anatolii. ‘I don’t believe the basement will save you, anyway,’ adds his wife. I have been asked not to tell them that their son Sasha — the Mail’s fixer in Kyiv — was hospitalised last week when he was struck by a car in the blackout, the kind of mishap that happens all too often in the darkened capital.
Sasha’s wife and two daughters spent five months in North London as refugees, returning in September because it seemed that Kyiv was safe. Now they spend air raids in their flat, sheltering in the bath tub or the apartment’s corridor.
In some elevators you might find a communal survival kit of bottled water, food and a blanket, for anyone who gets stuck for hours when the electricity fails. ‘We are all in this together,’ Sasha tells me.
I TRAVELLED to Ukraine this week with my family. My wife Lydia’s great-grandfather was born in the now Ukrainian port of Odesa.
Last October, we organised a fundraising dinner and auction in London, raising enough money to buy a second-hand Toyota Hilux pick-up truck and tens of thousands of pounds worth of medical supplies to be carried in it to Kyiv.
Our own efforts are assisted by the charity, British Ukrainian Aid, and Dr Sara McNeillis of University College Hospital London ( UCHL) and her colleagues.
The truck and aid was to be donated to the Kyiv-based Mercy and Health Foundation, headed by Dr Oleksandr Yatsyna, the 40-year-old deputy director of Ukraine’s National Cancer Institute who trained in Sheffield and UCHL.
Accompanied by our two teenage daughters and niece, Lydia and I cross the Polish-Ukrainian border on Orthodox Christmas Day — last Saturday — and on to Lviv for lunch with Oleksandr.
We find the daytime streets are thronged, as is a Yuletide service at the Garrison Church of Saints Peter and Paul. But Putin lurks.
Lviv had 90 per cent of its electricity supply knocked out by missile attack the week before. Most cafes and restaurants operate to the hum of diesel generators, installed on the pavements outside.
How interesting it is to see this situation through juvenile eyes. My daughters and niece, who’d raised funds for medical bags, now see soldiers with guns, sandbags, slogans of defiance and an effigy of Putin hanging by the neck from a window.
For Ukrainians, this is the norm; for my children a parallel universe, thank goodness.
While they return home from Lviv, Jamie and I carry on.
It grows colder as we travel east, hoping that the elderly Toyota — 200,000 miles on the clock — will make it to Kyiv and beyond with its precious cargo.
We pass T- 64 tanks on transporters going the other way to be repaired. Twenty
‘We hope for the best and shelter in the bathroom’
miles from the capital, we reach the village of Myla where, almost exactly nine months before, in a thick fog, we’d come upon a cavalcade of burnt- out civilian cars and corpses, left by the retreating Russians.
The petrol station that had then been the ruined focus of that horror is this evening a busy blaze of neon. Cars queuing. drivers buying hot dogs and coffee. But I will never forget how it was then.
We reach Kyiv and unload our truck at the Mercy and Health foundation. The charity is also being supported in its work by this newspaper’s Mail Force fund, which has donated £30,000.
Above the door hangs the slogan: ‘I believe we will win.’ Most of the staff are in their early 20s, bravely driving supplies to the ‘red zones’.
That night we dine with Dr Yatsyna and his gynaecologist wife, Dr Katya Bohadelnikova, at their home outside Kyiv. At 8pm, the lights fail and candles are lit.
‘What’s Putin expecting from this missile blitz?’ Dr Yatsyna asks in the semi- darkness. ‘ Because no one is going to beg Mr Zelensky to please negotiate so we can get our light and heat back on.’
Katya agrees, but admits that she is often exhausted by this existence. ‘I am trying to live my normal life but I’m very tired.’.
‘You don’t have electricity or Wi-Fi, and outside the house there is the boom, boom, boom of the air defence rockets. I think after this war we will all need psychological help. Sometimes I wonder if I am an actor in some horror movie.’
She loves ballet, particularly Swan Lake. ‘ But it is by Tchaikovsky who was Russian and
‘War destroys many things — not only with rockets’
so it is banned,’ she says. ‘This war destroys many things and not only with rockets.’
In April, she and her mother left to live with her sister in New Zealand. ‘But we came back in the summer. I had to be here with Oleksandr and help our people.’
At the start of the last missile barrage, on January 1, she was in the shower washing her hair. ‘I kept washing because I knew that if the power was cut I would not be able rinse out the shampoo.’
The next day we travel with the Toyota and some Mail Force medical supplies to Chernihiv, near the Belarusian border.
There we meet the head of the Chernihiv regional administration, Viacheslav Chaus, who pays tribute to Mail Force and our other donors.
Back in Kyiv, night falls once more. From my ninth-floor room the city resembles a country landscape with only occasional lights, like distant villages. Russia is expected to launch a 12th bombardment of critical infrastructure here.
Putin is turning the screw. Reports suggest another 500,000 conscripts are being mobilised for the frontline, in addition to the 300,000 Putin drafted last autumn. ukraine is also expected to launch a new offensive in the spring.
By the time you read this, Dr Bohadelnikova will be on her way to the ‘meat grinder’ Donetsk front line to drop off more supplies.
‘I believe we will win,’ remains her slogan and that of almost all ukrainians, despite the savagery of the Kremlin’s winter Blitz.