Boryspil, Ukraine (AP) - Emergency repair crews are working tirelessly to restore electricity in Ukraine's Kyiv region, officials said Wednesday, after relentless Russian barrage attacks on energy infrastructure left Ukrainians facing the coldest winter of the year.
In Boryspil, a region of about 60,000 people in Kyiv, workers dismantled and rebuilt scorched electrical systems as they rushed to repair the damage.
They work in the snow at -15 C (13 degrees F) temperatures from early morning until midnight, AP was told by Yuri Bryzh, who heads the regional division of the private electricity provider DTEK in Boryspil.
They managed to restore supply within four hours a day. But Bryzh said the problem was that "when the power comes back, people turn on all the electrical appliances available at home" when they run to shower, eat or charge their phones. That sets the system back again, he said.
The plight of civilians is acute, described by Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko as the longest and widest outage since Russia's full-scale invasion of its neighbor almost four years ago. Some homes have been without power for days.
Apartments in the capital are freezing, and people wear heavy layers of clothing when they go out to withstand the biting cold that seeps to the bones. Snow blankets the ground and rooftops across Kyiv, and piles up beside sidewalks. At night, streets are dark, and high-rise apartment buildings show no lights in their windows.
Kyiv residents told AP how they cope with the lack of light and heat at home.
A married couple, scientists Mikhail, 39, and Hanna, 39, said the temperature in their 5-year-old daughter Maria's bedroom had fallen to -15 degrees C (13 degrees F). They gave only their first names for security reasons.
They have a gas stove for cooking, but at night they sleep together in the same bed with heavy blankets. "We have to use all the blankets we have at home," Hanna said.
The couple takes their daughter to work during the day because the buildings have a generator, and Maria's kindergarten has no heating.
Their apartment walls still have Christmas decorations, which they illuminate with their flashlights from time to time.
Zinayida Glyikha, 76, said she heats water on the stove and puts it in bottles that she puts in her bed. She says she doesn't complain because Ukrainian soldiers on the front line, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) away, are in worse conditions.
"Of course, it's difficult, but if you imagine what our boys are going through now in the trenches, you have to endure," she said. "What can you do? It's war."
Tatyana Tararenko said her two sons are fighting in the war. She fears Russian night barrages more since a Shahed drone struck the residential building next to hers.
Her cold apartment showed that normal life had stopped.
"It's like life in the house has stopped, that's the feeling," she said.
Her neighbor, 89-year-old physicist Rasa Derkachova, lives alone and sometimes plays the piano, which she calls "this terrible cold."
"Of course, it's difficult to survive this. We survived World War II and now this terrible war has come," she said.
Russian barrages target power plants and large substations, and obtaining replacement equipment such as transformers can take months, said Denis Sakva, an energy sector analyst at Dragon Capital, a Ukrainian investment company.
"There are two types of heroes in Ukraine," he said. "They are the military and the energy workers."
___
Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed.
___
Follow AP's coverage of the Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
