Solar panels, generators and country homes: How Kyiv is preparing for another wartime winter

A country house as a winter refuge

Last winter, the temperature inside Maria Vorotylo's Kyiv apartment fell to just 5°C (41°F). Power outages often knocked out mobile service as well, making it nearly impossible for her to do her job teaching history online.

For students preparing to enter university, the disruption was particularly difficult.

“I sometimes had to teach them at 9 or 10 p.m., whenever the internet came back,” Vorotylo recalls. “Teenagers studied by candlelight and waited for an hour and a half of electricity just to submit their homework. By spring, graduating students were simply exhausted psychologically.”

By February, her family of six had made a decision: they needed another option before the next winter.

They spent their savings on an old house south of Kyiv and used the summer to turn it into what Vorotylo hopes will be a more autonomous refuge. The family installed a wood-burning stove alongside the gas boiler, insulated the floors, reinforced the basement to serve as a shelter, brought in fiber-optic internet and bought generators.

“We understand perfectly well that even if the war or intensive attacks stopped right now, the authorities simply wouldn't have enough time to fully restore the capacity that has been destroyed,” Vorotylo says. “And the enemy will strike the energy system again.”

The family plans to move into the house in November.

When a blackout becomes a heating crisis

For Kyiv, prolonged power outages are only part of the danger. The more serious threat comes when electricity cuts begin shutting down the systems that keep water and heat circulating through thousands of apartment buildings.

“If there is no electricity for eight, 10 or 12 hours, it is difficult, but the city can keep functioning,” says Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center. “The biggest threat is when heating systems stop while it is minus 10 or minus 15 degrees Celsius outside.”

If water stops circulating and begins to freeze inside heating pipes, he explains, utilities may have no choice but to drain the system to prevent widespread ruptures. Restoring heating to a large city after that can be extremely difficult.

Kyiv saw how quickly that risk could become real last winter.

During emergency outages in late January, around 600–700 apartment buildings in Troieshchyna, a vast residential district in northern Kyiv, were left without heating after Russian strikes damaged the energy system. The neighborhood was among the hardest hit parts of the capital, with burst pipes repeatedly adding to the disruption.

Electricity outages also meant that pumps stopped working in many high-rise buildings - and with them, running water.

“When the power goes out, the pumps shut down and we don't have a single drop of water,” says Tetiana Shkuratova, who heads the homeowners' association of a 25-story apartment building in the district. “And getting up to the 25th floor turns into mountaineering.”

Her building has 220 apartments and more than 500 residents. During prolonged outages, something as ordinary as drinking, cooking or flushing a toilet becomes a logistical problem: water has to be found elsewhere and carried upstairs. During last winter's outages, some Kyiv residents even melted snow for water.

Shkuratova says her building escaped one of the most damaging consequences of the heating failure because residents had insulated it in advance. Even without heating, the temperature in the basement stayed above 5°C (41°F), preventing the pipes from freezing and bursting.

The experience convinced residents that they needed their own backup power. The system cost more than 1 million hryvnias (about $24,000). Kyiv provided 300,000 hryvnias (about $7,200) through its SvitloDim municipal program, while residents covered the rest, contributing between 2,500 and 6,000 hryvnias ($60–$135) per apartment.

The system now keeps the building's water pumps, common-area lighting and elevators running during outages.

“This isn't about saving money or getting a quick return on investment,” Shkuratova says. “It's about basic survival and comfort. Either you buy yourself this ‘luxury item,’ or you sit without water or electricity, with elevators that don't work.”

Building resilience across the city

Shkuratova's building is one of a growing number in Kyiv trying to become less dependent on the centralized power grid.

The capital has around 12,000 apartment buildings. More than 2,000 have undergone energy-efficiency upgrades, while over 200 residential buildings and complexes now have their own solar power systems, according to Petro Panteleiev, deputy head of the Kyiv City State Administration.

“We call these buildings energy-resilient,” Panteleiev says. Residents are installing generators, battery-backed inverters and solar panels, with some buildings producing enough electricity to feed surplus power back into the grid.

But individual buildings are only one part of Kyiv's preparations.

The city has allocated more than 10 billion hryvnias (about $224 366 390) to its energy resilience plan. The work includes physical protection for critical infrastructure, backup power for water and heating systems, new cogeneration capacity and emergency heating systems.

The same effort extends to schools and kindergartens. As of July, 88% of Kyiv's educational facilities - including 438 kindergartens and 394 schools - had generators.

If prolonged blackouts make regular classes impossible, schools will be able to adjust their schedules, including extending winter breaks, moving some classes to June, switching to six-day school weeks or holding classes in shifts to make better use of daylight.

For Kyiv officials, however, generators and solar panels are only part of a much larger challenge: an energy system built over decades for peacetime is now being redesigned to function under sustained military attack.

An energy system built for peacetime

Ukraine's energy system was never designed for the kind of war it is now being forced to withstand.

“The system was built over 60 years for completely different purposes,” Kharchenko says. “It was designed to be highly centralized, on the assumption that no one would deliberately try to destroy the energy infrastructure of civilian cities.”

Making high-voltage substations or combined heat and power plants completely invulnerable to missiles - particularly ballistic missiles - in a single summer is physically and technically impossible, he says.

Instead, Ukraine is trying to make the system harder to disable and faster to restore.

Ukrenergo, Ukraine's state power grid operator, says it is continuing to build protective structures around critical transmission equipment. The defenses are designed to shield equipment from direct drone strikes and missile debris, although they cannot guarantee protection against a direct missile hit.

The company says measures already introduced over the past two years have saved hundreds of pieces of scarce equipment targeted in thousands of Russian attacks, significantly speeding up the restoration of the power system after mass strikes.

At the same time, Kyiv and energy companies are moving away from reliance on a small number of large facilities by building distributed generation - smaller power sources spread across the city that can keep essential systems operating even when parts of the wider grid are damaged.

That shift is particularly important for water and heating.

More than 70% of the problems during previous blackouts, Kharchenko says, were caused by insufficient backup power at water facilities. Even a boiler house with its own generator cannot provide heating if the city's water system cannot maintain the pressure needed to supply it.

And the generators used by individual homes or apartment buildings are nowhere near powerful enough for the job.

“You cannot power a water utility or a large pumping station with a five- or 10-kilowatt household generator,” Kharchenko says. “Those facilities need five, 10 or 15 megawatts.”

Large diesel generators and cogeneration units - which produce both electricity and heat from gas - are now being installed at key water and heating facilities. The goal is to create what Kharchenko describes as an autonomous loop: water utilities can keep pumping, heating plants continue receiving water, and circulation pumps have their own electricity even if the wider power grid fails.

“In that mode, the city can maintain basic heat and water regardless of the state of the general power grid,” he says.

But decentralization has limits. Current distributed generation capacity is not yet sufficient to fully replace the output lost from large power plants, and prolonged periods of severe cold could put the system under particular strain.

Buildings begin losing significant amounts of heat after six to eight days of temperatures below -10°C (14°F), while widespread use of electric heaters adds further pressure to an already heavily loaded winter power system.

Fully backing up Kyiv's heating network will take longer.

Kharchenko expects much of the backup power for water and heating infrastructure to be in place before winter, along with at least some of the protective structures now under construction. But creating enough alternative heat supply to compensate if the city's major combined heat and power plants are knocked out is a much bigger task.

“My objective assessment is that it will take two to three years to fully provide backup for our entire heating system,” he says.

Turning winter into a weapon

Russia is also trying to turn the prospect of another difficult winter into an information weapon.

An analysis by hromadske of Russian propaganda on Telegram, Facebook and YouTube in early August found recurring claims that Ukraine was unprepared for the coming heating season. Russian sources have sought to blame potential winter shortages on Ukrainian strikes against targets in Russia and on alleged mismanagement of Western assistance - shifting responsibility away from Moscow's sustained campaign against Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

The physical attacks, meanwhile, continue.

On August 27, Russian forces struck the combined heat and power plant in the southern city of Kherson with four guided aerial bombs, according to Ukraine's state-owned energy company Naftogaz. The attack destroyed all remaining heat and power generation equipment at the plant, which provides heating to a significant share of the city's residential buildings.

It was the second Russian strike on the facility in two days. Naftogaz says the plant has been attacked dozens of times in 2026 alone.

For Kyiv, the same threat shapes preparations for the months ahead. Officials and energy experts say there is no way to make a large city's infrastructure completely immune to missile attacks. The immediate goal is instead to make sure that when one part of the system is hit, the rest can keep functioning — and that essential services can be restored quickly.

Stay or leave?

For Kyiv residents, preparations for winter ultimately come down to a personal question: how much risk are they prepared to live with - and what alternatives do they have?

Vorotylo and her family have made their choice. In November, the six of them plan to leave their Kyiv apartment for the old house they spent the summer preparing, with its stove, generators, insulated floors, fiber-optic internet and basement shelter.

For those only now considering a move to the countryside, environmental activist Maksym Zalevskyi offers a warning: living in a village is not automatically an easier or safer alternative. People should first ask themselves whether they know how to use a wood-burning stove, obtain and store firewood, and manage without conveniences such as a sewer system. For those determined to leave a major city, he suggests considering apartments in smaller towns in relatively safer parts of Ukraine instead.

Kharchenko has made the opposite choice.

“I'm not going anywhere,” he says. “I'm confident we'll get through it. It won't be easy. It will be a difficult winter, and we need to talk about that.”

He describes what Ukraine is doing as a transition from critical infrastructure designed for peacetime to systems adapted to the realities of war - a transformation for which there is little precedent elsewhere in the world.

Kyiv officials say that work is already well underway, from new distributed generation and backup power to physical protection for critical infrastructure. But much of it will take years, not months, and another winter will arrive long before the transformation is complete.

For now, Kyiv is preparing with what it has: solar panels on apartment buildings, generators at schools, new defenses around energy facilities - and, for some families, a stove in an old house outside the city.

The goal is not to make winter easy. It is to make sure the city can live through it.