Growing up in a cold and dark Ukraine under constant Russian attack

Sophia can tell an outgoing missile blast from an incoming Shahed drone attack. She attends kindergarten. Her older sister has learning difficulties, so Sophia grabs her hand when the sirens scream, and the air buzzes with what the family calls “bees” – incoming drones.

She then leads her sister to safety in the Soviet-era bunkers outside their old but untargeted ground-floor apartment, where school carries on.

“For them it’s normal. They cannot imagine their life without it,” Oleksandr explains. “They know that when they go to the kindergarten we still don’t have power in the flat. When they come back there is no power. They have learned how to play using little lights and how to play in darkness.

A couple of weeks ago what he thinks was a Shahed drone smashed into the top floors of the building next door, setting fire to two flats and injuring three people in the Kremlin’s ongoing campaign. Fragments, bits of plastic and yellow foam of the Iranian-designed autonomous plane loaded with 40kg of explosive, still pepper the snow outside the building – where this member of Ukraine’s parliament has lived with his family for four years.

Roughly half of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity has been destroyed by Russia. Most of these attacks have come since Donald Trump ended military aid to Ukraine last year – in the 36th month of the full-scale invasion by Russia. Two-thirds of its nuclear capacity has fallen and GDP is expected to take a 3 per cent hit.

“I started to plunge into a kind of depression and apathy because when it’s cold, when for the whole day you cannot even warm up food, and it’s dark, and it’s cold – it is difficult psychologically for me, and for many people.

“It looked endless, you know, just endless. And everything came at once, this cold weather which we haven’t had for years since the full-scale invasion, this darkness,” says Oleksandr, warming his hands on a mug of green tea.

When power does come, usually between one and two in the morning, he likes to stay up with all the lights on just to recharge his psychological batteries. Millions of other Ukrainians go through the same experiences every night. They have done so for months.

They are all fed up with lofty “pompous” phrases about plucky Ukrainian “resilience”, which Oleksandr calls the “adaptation that has been forced upon us”. It is clear why he thinks Putin has focused so heavily on civilian targets and energy systems.

“He realised that he cannot win on the battlefield. And he decided to focus on our critical infrastructure and to create conditions which are uninhabitable.

“That’s his goal. To break our defiance – to make them more submissive to his peace plan,” says the MP, a member of Volodymyr Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People Party.