The Human Cost of War

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The Morning

The Human Cost of War

Our colleague spent two months in Kyiv.

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A power plant in Kyiv, Ukraine, after a Russian attack this year.

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Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

By

Sam Sifton

I am the host of The Morning.

April 3, 2026,

6:42 a.m. ET

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Conflict stalks the globe, and it can be dizzying to keep track. There’s war in the Middle East, of course, and Pakistani attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan. There are civil wars raging in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Yemen, in Congo. Widen your lens slightly and take in the specter of turmoil in Libya, cartel violence in Mexico, gang violence in Haiti. Combat is everywhere. The disputes grab our attention and then release it, and then grab it again.

Today I’d like to return us to the war Russia has been waging on Ukraine since 2022, and to the Ukrainian people who are living through it. They grabbed Chivers’s attention. He spent two months in Kyiv this winter to bring them to ours.

Weaponizing the cold

His reporting comes from a residential neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Kyiv called Troieshchyna. Most of the buildings you’ll see there are classic late-Soviet apartment blocks — giant stacks of prefabricated reinforced concrete panels, some rising 15 stories or more above the street. Few have boilers to provide heat. Instead, the Soviet government built centralized thermal plants to supply hot water and heat to dozens, even hundreds, of buildings at a time.

This winter, one of the coldest in Ukraine in close to 20 years, Russian forces used long-range strikes to target those plants, rendering huge swaths of Troieshchyna virtually uninhabitable.

Here’s Chivers:

The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”

Ukrainians called what followed the “kholodomor,” a sort of portmanteau of the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague.” More than 600,000 residents fled the city in search of warmth and safety as Russian drones continued to strike. Many others, though, stayed in their frigid homes, their futures unsure. One lined her floors with blankets and extra carpets, insulation against the cold concrete. “I’m very depressed because of all of this,” another told Chivers. “People say, ‘You should enjoy life because you are still alive.’ I’m not sure I want to stay alive.”

Image

In a Kyiv apartment.

Credit...

Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

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