(CN) — Ukraine’s third winter at war may be the most difficult yet as Russia pounds its power grid and natural gas infrastructure, causing daily power outages and making it difficult for Ukrainians to stay warm.
Despite Russia’s massive bombing, Ukrainians continue to show tough-minded fortitude and determination to hold out against attacks and continue fighting.
Still, the humanitarian picture is dire, with large chunks of Ukraine’s population scattered inside and outside the country, its infrastructure in shambles, a staggering toll in death and injury from the front lines and the war’s trauma affecting every aspect of life.
“Things are getting worse. The push of the armed forces of the Russian Federation is considerable, air attacks have been increasing in recent weeks,” said Matthias Schmale, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, in a telephone interview with Courthouse News in late November.
He said getting through this winter will be difficult but the U.N. and the Ukrainian leadership are hopeful “this nightmare ends next year.”
On Wednesday, Schmale briefed reporters in Kyiv about a recent trip he made to the war-ravaged eastern Donetsk region. He said the U.N. verified more than 2,180 civilian deaths and injuries between October and November and that intense fighting has forced nearly 40,000 people from their homes in the past two months.
Schmale said he met two elderly evacuees in Dnipro who lost everything to the war. “Understandably, they expressed a pessimistic outlook for a better future,” he said.
The U.N.’s focus is on helping Ukrainians make it through the winter. For example, convoys take fuel, warm clothing and shelter repair kits to people living close to the front lines, Schmale told Courthouse News. The 62-year-old German was appointed in August to lead U.N. efforts in Ukraine.
He said the U.N. also runs programs to distribute cash to help people pay for basic needs such as water, sanitation and food.
“Despite the war, this is still a functioning market economy,” Schmale said. “Of course, the closer you get to the front line, the more things are disrupted.”
While life in Ukraine is extremely difficult, much of the country continues to function despite the difficulties caused by the war, according to Ukrainian surveys, reports and officials.
This state of affairs can be attributed in large part to a steady flow of military, financial and humanitarian aid, the vast majority of it coming from Europe and the United States.
As of October, Ukraine had received about $221.6 billion in aid from Europe and the U.S., according to the Berlin-based Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Additionally, Canada has provided more than $8 billion in aid and Japan more than $9.5 billion, Kiel data shows.
Food and basic services remain widely available, the economy is limping along and even flourishing in some areas, domestic violence and substance abuse aren’t any worse than before the war and the number of homeless people is low.
“At this moment, people’s perceived well-being is the same as it was before the invasion,” Anton Grushetskyi, the executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, said in a telephone interview.
He said surveys show the number of Ukrainians living in extreme poverty is much the same as it was before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, with between 6% and 10% of Ukrainians saying they cannot afford food. Only 2% of people said they had difficulty accessing drinking water, he said.
On its website, the institute’s most recent survey asking Ukrainians about their general state of well-being was conducted between May and June 2023. Its results were based on responses from about 2,013 respondents across Ukraine; it did not include answers from people living in Ukrainian territories, such as Crimea and the Donbass, controlled by Russia.
Grushetskyi said the conflict actually has made Ukrainians more united and even more determined to endure hardships because they see winning the war as a matter of life and death.
“The majority say the war is existential,” he said. “They believe that Russia wants to harm them physically, to destroy the Ukrainian nation. People are saying: ‘Yes, we are tired, it’s a nightmare, but we cannot just give up because then you will be killed, raped and destroyed.’”
Ukrainians also are driven by hopes for a brighter future.
“We’re suffering right now, but in five, 10 years we will be members, for example, of the European Union,” he said. “So, we just need to survive right now and then we, our kids, our grandchildren, will be living better lives. It drives us to send kids to schools, to open businesses, to buy something.”
The most recent opinion polls demonstrate Ukrainians aren’t buckling and that the Western aid pouring into the country is helping ensure the country’s future, he said.
For example, recent polls show the vast majority of Ukrainians say they want to remain in their country for many years to come and a survey from October 2024 found 63% of Ukrainians still saying they are ready to endure the difficulties of war for as long as necessary to win.
However, the same poll, based on 989 interviews, showed big regional differences with less than half of those people living close to the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine saying they were ready to indefinitely endure the war. Also, the poll showed fewer Ukrainians confident that Russia will become exhausted and depleted by the war.
Grushetskyi said the economic situation in Ukraine is not as dire as one would assume, in large part thanks to income Ukrainians make from the country’s extensive “shadow economy.”
“The share of those who need cash or this huge investment is much lower than you could think, because we have lots of our economy in the shadows,” he said. “Official salaries are much lower than real incomes. Lots of people have enough other sources of income and they can manage to survive.”
Schmale said, “This is not a failed state, unlike other places where the U.N. is very prominent. This is a functioning, democratic, legitimate government with considerable capacities.”
Still, it is far from a rosy picture.
Russia’s bombing campaigns have massively disrupted Ukraine’s ability to provide power and heating.
“There are regular shortages of electricity,” Grushetskyi said.
On Nov. 29, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said there had been at least 1,120 attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure since 2022. Since then, those attacks have continued with Moscow ramping up its attacks on power generation, transmission, and distribution facilities.
Blackouts are causing widespread distress.
“For my business, winter with blackouts is a disastrous time,” Iryna Fishchuk, a small bakery and café owner in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, told the U.N. in a recent report about how the electricity crisis hurts women.
She said generators are not powerful enough to run the bakery’s ovens during extended power outages, making it hard for her to pay her staff.
“Every winter is a matter of survival for the business and the employees you hire,” Fishchuk said.
The situation is much worse in places closer to the front lines, according to officials who wrote the U.N. report.
“Power outages affect the ability of women to work and support their families,” said Liliia Kislitsyna, president of SMARTA, a women’s rights group based in Donetsk, a region on the war’s front lines. “The further one goes into remote towns and villages, the worse the electricity situation becomes. As a result, women often work fewer hours and do not receive full wages.”
Despite winter’s additional difficulties, Grushetskyi said by and large Ukrainians are coping well.
“Given it’s our third winter with this terrorist state’s full-scale invasion, people have actually adapted,” he said. He said it is common to rely on fuel-powered generators and big rechargeable batteries, often known as accumulators, to keep elevators running, homes warmed and businesses open.
He said about 60% of Ukrainians say they expect it to be a normal winter while 8% see their conditions this winter as dire.
“People feel it, people suffer,” he said. “But people do not say: ‘We should sign a peace deal just to have electricity.’ People say it’s much better to have no electricity but continue resisting Russian aggression.”
He added: “People are irritated, but they hate Russia in the first place. And in the second place, they criticize the West.”
He said criticism of the West is common because Ukrainians feel that the Unites States and its European allies are holding back on supplying the air defenses and weapons Kyiv needs to adequately fight Russia.
The war has caused a diaspora too.
The U.N. estimates that as of October, 6.7 million Ukrainians were living as refugees, 92% of them in Europe.
At the same time, about 3.7 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes due to the war were scattered around Ukraine, U.N. figures show. Of those, between 78,000 and 100,000 people were considered very vulnerable and housed in about 1,800 communal sites around the country, the U.N. said. University dormitories, trade union buildings and other structures have been turned into housing for those dispossessed by the war.
Grushetskyi said about 67% of internally displaced Ukrainians rent their own apartments, 20% live with friends and family, 5% live in homes they bought and 8% live in community shelters.
He said initially many people displaced by the war were offered housing in rural areas, but due to a lack of work in the countryside they chose to move into urban areas. The employment rate among the displaced has risen from 37% in 2022 to 56% today, he said. Labor shortages are acute in Ukraine and it appears work is plentiful.
In the great upheaval and mass exodus caused by the war, Grushetskyi said Ukrainians from different parts of the country have gotten to know each other better and in turn they’ve softened regional biases they once harbored.
“There has been increased cohesion inside Ukrainian society,” he said.
It’s hard to know what Ukraine’s total population is because the last census was done in 2001. Demographers estimate the total population at about 35 million with about 5 million people living in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces.
The war has caused massive infrastructure damage. By the end of 2023, $152 billion worth of damage had been inflicted on Ukraine and Russia, according to U.N. figures. The brunt of the destruction has been to housing, transport, commerce, industry, agriculture and energy sectors.
The hardest-hit areas are Kyiv, the capital, and those regions along the front lines, namely Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. About 10% of Ukraine’s housing stock has been damaged or destroyed.
At least 365 schools have been completely destroyed and more than 3,400 others damaged, according to Ukraine’s education ministry in a report.
Still, schools remain open even close to the front lines. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, six underground subway stations have been turned into schools.
“So, there’s about at least 6,000 children in the city of Kharkiv that are able to physically go to school for a few hours a week,” Schmale said.
Health care facilities and workers have come under attack too, causing 197 deaths and 670 injuries by November this year, according to the World Health Organization.
By December 2023, the war’s toll on the economy and costs associated with the conflict, such as picking up all the rubble, was valued at $499 billion, a World Bank report estimated. New damage assessments for the past year of fighting have not yet been released.
Since January 2022, the U.N. Human Rights Office has documented 12,168 civilian deaths have been documented.
The number of soldier deaths and casualties on the two warring sides remain far from certain and there are wildly different assessments. Official counts from either side are highly unlikely to be accurate, but experts believe the war has left more than 1 million soldiers killed and wounded, making it by far the deadliest war in Europe since World War II.
Ukraine’s defense ministry claims 770,420 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded and Russia’s defense ministry claims close to 1 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and wounded.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.