The Daily - Life in Ukraine as Russia Weaponizes Winter

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

For months, the war in Ukraine was about territory as both sides fought to control areas in the country’s south and east.In recent weeks, the war has taken a new turn.Mounting attacks on civilian infrastructure have left people across Ukraine without power, heat and sometimes water as the snow begins to fall.Guest: Marc Santora, the International News Editor for The New York Times.Background reading: Even as Ukrainian workers race to restore basic services like electricity, heat and water, new Russian airstrikes send them back to the starting line.Survival kits in elevators, alternative menus in cafes, flashlights and generators everywhere: This is life under Russian bombardment.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. For months, the war in Ukraine was about territory. This is an army on a roll. The Ukrainians are taking advantage of Russia's faltering military. As both sides fought to control areas in Ukraine's south and east. What happened here wasn't just a defeat for President Putin. It was a complete humiliation. But in recent weeks, it has become about something more.

Public transport at a virtual standstill. This entire apartment complex lit only by headlights. Small shops lit only by candles. Mounting attacks on civilian infrastructure that have left people across Ukraine without power, heat, and sometimes even water as the snow starts to fall. President Zelensky says four and a half million Ukrainians have no power. Today, I talk to my colleague Mark Santora about the new turn in the war. It's Monday, December 5th. So Mark, we haven't done a show about Ukraine in quite a while now.

Tell me about what's been happening. Yeah, well, so in a nutshell, it's been a really bad couple months for the Kremlin. So basically what we have now then as winter sets in is a redrawn front line. The Ukrainians have reclaimed more than 50% of the territory that Russia had initially grabbed in those early months of the war, and they're pressing against the Russians. At the same time, Russia was forced to declare a mobilization, trying to bring new bodies into the battle because it suffered such heavy losses. So the Russians now are basically trying to stabilize new defensive lines. At the same time,

the Ukrainians are taking a bit of a breather themselves to reposition and get ready for what will be the Winter War. Basically just waiting for the ground to harden so the tanks and armored vehicles and other things can move again and the two armies can engage in maneuvers. But there's a second front in this war and that sort of started in early October when Russia unleashed this massive volley of missiles across the country, basically hitting targets far from the front line, as distant as Lviv in the west, and concentrating here where I am in Kiev. And these were places that hadn't seen large-scale attacks since early in the war.

So it wasn't clear what was happening. So no discernible pattern. And you're thinking, I guess, like, okay, this is just the Russians blasting off stuff like they always have. Right. So while the pattern might not have been clear right away, it was clear that these things were coming in waves, 60, 70, 80 missiles once a week, almost like clockwork. And each one of these attacks, the fallout would be different and progressively worse. Oh, man. And then this massive wave comes in on October 31st, which at that point was the largest wave of missiles

on a single day of the war so far. And almost the minute the rockets start exploding, the power goes out in Kiev and something else happens that we hadn't seen before, which is the water stops running. So we saw people lined up in the cold, dark night carrying jugs and buckets and whatever else they could going to wells and other sort of drinking points

where they would basically fill up what they could so they would have water to wash clothes, to cook with, to drink. And this is like Kiev, like a city of 3.3 million people. It's like, you know, it's not a village in rural Ukraine. No, it was amazing. And so you saw, you know, people just lugging these jugs of water up 9, 12, 15 flights into high-rise buildings. The power is sort of gradually coming in in some places. It's out in other places.

And nobody really knows exactly what's happening because the other thing that happens during these attacks in the first hour or two is communication becomes really hard. Cell phone networks go down. Internet providers go down. Basically, this is where it became really apparent just how connected power is to everything we do in modern life, particularly in an urban city. So, you know, the water, the power, the internet, telecommunications, heating, all of these things are tied together. And when you start to rip at that fabric, it can come apart. So these sound like some pretty severe outages. I mean, even by the standards of wartime Kiev.

What did you do next to figure out what was going on? So after discussions with the head utility company here, which is called your Krenigo, they agreed to let us go see a power substation that was hit in one of these strikes. And they took us a place we're not allowed to disclose because these are considered critical infrastructure, on a bus to central Ukraine,

and brought us to what is a sprawling substation filled with wires and towers. But on this substation is one particular piece of machinery that's called a transformer, which is this sort of metal monster about the size of a bus. And this one had been hit directly with a precision cruise missile. Its guts were exploded.

The copper coiling and electric wires all over the place. The blast was so powerful, the energy inside this thing so great that it blew out the windows of a school a mile away. Wow. So when it got hit, it was the second time the Russians had targeted this plant, but they scored a direct hit on this very tiny thing from hundreds of miles away. Wow. And this is what was so fascinating because, you know, the head of the National Utility Company is convinced that the only way they could be doing this is to be being guided by electrical engineers

looking at maps from the Soviet era when, for instance, this plant I went to was built in 1958. Much of the infrastructure in this country and the critical infrastructure is in the same place it was back in the Soviet era. So there are people in Moscow who know exactly where this stuff is and, you know, are helping, at least according to the Ukrainians, guide the people sending the missiles into Ukraine to hit these very specific targets. to hit these very specific targets.

So at this point, you're realizing Russia very much set out with these missile strikes to hit critical utilities around Ukraine. Like, this wasn't a coincidence that they hit this substation. Oh, no, certainly not. And, you know, it sort of became clear that what the Russian plan was, which is target infrastructure, but that they were succeeding in some of these places with precision strikes, Бажаю здоров'я, шановні українці! Бажаю здоров'я, шановні українці. Готуємо відповіді на можливі нові терористичні атаки проти нашої енергосистеми. До будь-яких сценаріїв, враховуючи, які терористи воюють проти нашого народу.

Розгортаємо по всій країні і наш новий проєкт підтримки людей – пункти незламності. Пройти цей складний час. Слава Україні! and to try and get them, you know, basically through what is going to be a long, hard winter. But it's not even like 48 hours after Zelensky gives that speech when we're walking down the street, it's the middle of the afternoon, and we start to hear in the skies above us a boom. And then another boom. And it's cloudy and foggy, so we can't really see what's going on, but you can see sort of these flashes in the sky.

And there's something like 20 rockets shot down above the skies of Kiev that day. Another 10 or 12 rockets hit targets in and around the city. And by the time the night falls, every building is pitch black. There's just like no light anywhere. And it's clear that this strike had a more devastating impact than anything we'd seen before. The Russians hit not only the power plants and the distribution centers, but take all of the country's nuclear power plants offline. That's like 50% of the country's energy just suddenly gone. The grid itself is so destabilized that there's like 50% of the country's energy just suddenly gone. The grid

itself is so destabilized that there's no sense of when the power is going to be on or off or back on for good. So it's at this point that it's become clear to everyone that, you know, while fighting is still raging all along the front line, there's this new front now that's opened up, the energy front. And that front affects 40 million people virtually in every corner of the country. We'll be right back. Okay, so Mark, it's clear to you now that the Russians have this shift in strategy, you know, attacking Ukraine's energy infrastructure. How are the Ukrainian people adapting to this? Like, what's life like in Ukraine right now?

First of all, it's sort of amazing and remarkable how quickly people seem to be able to adapt here to really insanely hard circumstances. You know, the temperature this week is going to drop to minus six and well below freezing. And so, see you later. Is it supposed to snow a lot tonight, you think? Yes? All right. Cool. Since these last strikes, I've been going out on the streets of Kiev just to talk to as many people as I can. Do you have heat in your apartment? Yeah, I do, but it's not very hot. I think when the power goes out, heat goes out too, because I think...

To try and get a sense of just what it's like to live in a modern city that's been thrown into an era before reliable power. Will you stay, you think, if the power stays out? You're not going to go anywhere. And it's actually kind of remarkable. We went to spend the day in the old trading neighborhood called Podil. And literally every store somehow has gotten their hands on a generator so you hear this sort of rattle and hum of these machines.

Big ones, little ones, new ones, old ones, diesel powered. Basically just all around you is the sound of these generators so that these stores, restaurants, health clinics, pharmacies, can stay open and keep business going, the generator has become the Ukrainians' defensive weapon, at least on the energy front. So, you know, everywhere we went, we saw people sort of adapting and this kind of remarkable resilience we've seen over nine months of work, quite frankly. So you have this menu here. What is the menu? Yeah, sure. There was this one barista we spoke to who, you

know, just sort of struck me both because she had this magnetic smile, but also these exhausted eyes. And you could just tell that living this way was just tiring. So we created this menu that says kitchen with no lights and kitchen with generator. So everyone will still have some food and drink. The cafe has created these basically different menus depending on the kind of power they have. Oh, no way. Yeah, well, they have absolutely no power. They have some cold dishes, including, you know, a madeleine with chocolate. They have Greek yogurt.

If they have generator power, then they have some of their hot dishes, including homemade pasta. Unfortunately, we don't make any coffee with espresso, but we have tea, we have some alcohol, and filtered coffee. But even with the generator, the espresso machine doesn't work, so she apologized and said, you know, only filtered coffee. And then they have the menu for when the power is working normally, which, you know, has been kept in the drawer for the past weeks. Another person we came across in our reporting was this surgeon who sent us a video of an operating room at the Kiev Heart Institute. The director there takes us inside the operating room the minute the electricity goes out.

And you see surgeons operating with headlamps, six sets of hands in the dim light. There's basically a child on the operating room table having heart surgery. Just, you know, sort of these shadows lit up. The generators kick on and they're keeping the life support machines running as these doctors perform the surgery. It's a pretty harrowing thing to watch this very delicate procedure done in the dim light of a headlamp. Oh, so crazy, Mark. Yeah. He says in the video, Russia, look what you're making us do.

Yeah, yeah. But for all the suffering and hardship I witnessed around the city these past few days there are also these times when even the darkness itself lends a kind of magic to the moment hello to the philharmonic yes yeah one example of of just kind of one of these unexpectedly lovely moments came one night when we went to go see the National Philharmonic Play. They're based in this stately mansion built in 1882. And the director is this kindly gentleman who guided us through these darkened halls by a lamp and took us down first to the bomb shelter, essentially.

Wow. And down there they were singing, you know, these sort of amazing kind of show tunes. And there was a violinist playing. So they were playing in the bomb shelter? They were playing in the bomb shelter. Whoa. And then we went up the concert. They were setting up to have a performance that night,

so we went again guided by a lantern up through these very ornate halls. And, you know, there was no need to dim the lights before the musicians took the stage. The only light were these small battery-powered LED lamps as the ensemble gathered. And played this song by Mozart. And it was just, you know, it was just beautiful. And for the people who were there, a few dozen people, you know, they just all got lost in the moment. And in that case, you know, the darkness kind of added to this sort of very strange, but in that moment beautiful scene. When you go out and talk to people who are exhausted and dealing with this, you see this kind of sense that they're a part of this war themselves, that they might not be in the trenches,

but they've got to endure and fight to keep these cities livable and businesses open and things going and working. Mark, if you zoom out, how has this changed your view of where we are in the war right now? So fundamentally, on the front line, the Russians are still losing. They're still on the back foot. They're taking just incredibly heavy losses. taking just incredibly heavy losses. And there is no indication they've fixed any of the systemic problems that have plagued their military since the outset of the war. But it's also clear now

that Ukraine needs assistance on this energy front. And the U.S. said that they're going to give some $50 million, for instance, to go towards the grid. But one of these transformers can cost $100 million. And when you look at what's happening and the amount of damage being done to the Ukrainian energy grid, the cost of replacing this, that's a challenge. I think they're just,

people are getting their heads around. And I don't know if there even exists yet a kind of coordinated effort to really get these things here in time to get them through the winter. As I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm also looking out my window here at this really, really dark horizon. There's a snow falling. I can see just sort of the shadows of the snow on the cathedral.

And it's really, really cold. The streets are empty. It's like near curfew, and it's only going to get colder. But for the moment, walking around Kiev, after each one of these attacks, people have found a way to go through the darkness, keep on living, keep on working, and waiting to see what the next wave of missiles does

to what is already a very exhausting and difficult life. Mark, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. On Monday, Russia launched another volley of missiles at Ukraine's energy grid. Ukrainian air defense systems fired into the sky in multiple locations in the country, but not all the missiles were intercepted. Power blinked out in several regions, and Ukrainians in Kiev and other cities far from the front lines,

headed for bomb shelters. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Saturday, Iran's Attorney General suggested that his government had abolished its morality police, the much-feared unit responsible for enforcing Iran's strict conservatism in public dress and behavior. The morality police have been the focus of protests that began in September after Masa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, died in their custody. The attorney general's remarks set off a controversy. One state Arabic television channel said that his comment had been taken out of context. But the foreign minister, as well as one lawmaker, when asked about it,

did not deny it. As of Sunday night, the government itself had not officially announced the abolition of the Morality Police. Disbanding the unit would be the first major concession to the protests, now in their third month. Women's rights activists and lawyers said such a move would do little to appease protesters, who've moved beyond the demands of dress and now want regime change. the demands of dress and now want regime change. And InfoWars host Alex Jones has filed for bankruptcy after losing a series of defamation lawsuits. Courts have ordered Jones to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. The families contended that Jones lied for years about the school shooting on his radio and online shows. Today's episode was produced by Muj Zaydi, Diana Nguyen, Rob Zipko, and Asla Chaturvedi, with help from Michelle Banja.

It was edited by Mark George, with help from Michael Benoit. Contains original music by Marian Lozano, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Marian Lozano. Special thanks to David Gutenfelder. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.