STATEMENT: Families in Ukraine Camping in Their Homes to Stay Warm During Power Cuts in One of the Coldest Weeks This Winter

Families in Ukraine are turning to increasingly desperate measures to survive power blackouts following attacks on energy facilities which have left them without heating and water in one of Ukraine’s coldest weeks this winter, Save the Children said.

Continued attacks in Ukraine have caused widespread power outages as temperatures dropped to minus 20 in parts of the country this week. Temperatures are forecast to reach similar lows next week.

Large-scale attacks across the country have left thousands of homes, multistory apartment buildings, hospitals—including maternity wards—and schools without heat.

Sonia Khush, Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine, said:

"Children and families in Ukraine are turning to increasingly desperate ways to survive a long and grueling winter of repeated and prolonged attacks on energy infrastructure, which has left families without heat, power and water—with no letup of freezing temperatures in sight.

"In urban areas where people depend almost entirely on centralized heating and water, people are less able to turn to other means such as burning firewood or lighting stoves to cope. Instead, families in some cities are resorting to camping in tents in their own bedrooms or heating bricks on gas burners just to try and create a little more warmth with the temperature inside some homes as low as 3 to 5 degrees [37 to 41 degrees Fahrenheit]. People are cooking on camping stoves and using their balconies as make-shift fridges to stop their food from spoiling as there is no power in their homes.

“The freezing temperatures are gnawing away at daily life in Ukraine. Many families are engaged in an exhausting cycle of seeing the power come back following repairs, only to see it go out again with another strike. Winter is being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine. Save the Children is calling for an end to the war on children and attacks on civilian infrastructure.”

Save the Children has been working in Ukraine since 2014 and has scaled up operations since February 2022 and now has a team of about 200 staff based in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv, and Dnipro. Working with more than 25 partners, the organization has provided support to more than 4.2 million people, including around 1.6 million children.

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