Alina Rohach, Project Manager of the Spain and Latin America Cooperation Program at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center, provided a comment to Infobae (a leading Latin American news outlet) on how Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are reshaping civilian life in Kyiv during extreme winter conditions.
Rohach emphasised that the core effect is not only material damage, but the psychology of uncertainty: when people cannot predict whether there will be light, heat, or water, the sense of control over daily life collapses. In her words, time stops being organised into “normal days” and becomes divided into windows of “when there is electricity” and “when there is not.”
Speaking from Kyiv, she described how residents are forced to reorganise basic routines around outages — sometimes waking up at 3–4 a.m. to shower, charge phones, and prepare food before returning to sleep ahead of work. Rohach also highlighted the vulnerability created by centralised heating and power systems: once the network is disrupted, apartments cool rapidly, and indoor temperatures can fall to around 5°C or lower, turning homes into “freezers” in a matter of hours.
At the same time, Rohach noted that people find ways to endure — keeping moving to stay warm, sharing resources, and sustaining small forms of community support. Yet she warned against interpreting adaptation as normalisation: surviving sub-zero winter without stable electricity, water, and heating is not a “new normal,” but an extreme, deliberately imposed stress test — and it reinforces the need for sustained international assistance.
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