Kyiv families weigh exodus as Russian strikes intensify winter crisis

Mariia Shostak is packing her apartment in Kyiv, but she's not waiting for the snow. She's leaving now, taking her four-year-old son Artur and two-year-old daughter Kira to Hurghada, Egypt, where the winter sun will warm them and the power grid won't fail. Last winter in the capital was, by her account, unbearable—weeks without heat, temperatures inside her flat dropping to freezing, the constant hum of air raid sirens. But it was the shift in late August and early September that broke her resolve. The Russian strikes, which had once landed on the outskirts, were now falling in the city center, directly overhead. "Everything changed," she says. "I don't feel safe in Ukraine in any way."

She is not alone in that calculation. A September survey by Gradus research found that 40 percent of Ukrainians were actively considering relocation if conditions continued to deteriorate. Another 35 percent said they would stay; 25 percent remained undecided. The pressures driving the deliberation are compounding. Russia's campaign against Ukraine's power infrastructure has intensified as autumn approaches, and with it comes the prospect of another winter of blackouts and sub-zero cold. But the strikes have also broadened in scope. Kyiv mayor Vitaly Klitschko described the city as facing a "very dramatic situation" after Russia's late-September attacks on petrol stations, power plants, and key bridges spanning the Dnipro river. For families with young children, the combination of cold, darkness, and the constant threat of explosion has become intolerable.

Iryna, who asked that her surname not be published, knows this calculus intimately. Her three-year-old daughter Polina struggled through the last winter—weeks without heating, the apartment temperature hovering at zero or five degrees Celsius, the child sick almost constantly. But the recent missile strikes have accelerated her family's crisis. In early June, an explosion blew out several windows of their apartment on Kyiv's northwestern edge. A month later, after repairs had begun, a second blast near the base of their ten-story building sent a wave of earth through their flat, forcing them into temporary housing. Polina's health has deteriorated sharply. She now suffers from severe anxiety, accompanied by incontinence, vomiting, and uncontrollable shaking. "There are new symptoms after each shelling," Iryna says. Her husband is serving in the army. She works remotely for an international NGO and is considering Poland as a base, though no decision has been made.

Not all who are leaving Kyiv are heading abroad. Olena Konoplia spent weeks scouting locations before settling on a cottage in a rural village two hours outside the capital. She chose deliberately: a place with no factories, no warehouses, no railway stations—nothing that might draw Russian fire. On the day of a recent visit, she was ferrying supplies and overseeing the installation of a new door. A priest had already blessed the house, following Ukrainian tradition. The cottage has gas-powered convection heaters, and an adjacent barn holds a stack of firewood for the inevitable power cuts. She has installed high-speed internet, necessary for her work at a Kyiv-based charitable foundation. Her elderly mother, who lives in a particularly dangerous district of the capital, will soon join her. "After several nights here, when I can sleep, just sleep, without any explosions, without any sirens, I feel better," Olena says. "I can work, write my articles, I feel good."

Evgeniya Blyznyuk, founder and CEO of Gradus, notes that the decision to leave is driven by a layering of anxieties, not simply the prospect of blackouts. "People are thinking about a combination of stress factors," she explains. "Not just about electricity and blackouts like last winter. Russians are targeting big logistics centres, which means that the population is worrying about products, about food during the winter." Supermarkets are already experiencing periodic shortages. Energy companies are warning of scheduled power cuts. The authorities are preparing as best they can: converting sanatoriums and rehabilitation centers in the forested outskirts into shelters for the elderly and women with young children. Over the past eighteen months, a network of roughly fifteen small-scale power plants has been constructed around the city, each housed in fortified bunkers and protected from drone attack by massive steel cages, each capable of supplying electricity and heat to several hundred apartment blocks.

Yet Blyznyuk does not expect a mass exodus. Most people, she says, have not yet made a final decision. They are reluctant to abandon their jobs or pull their children from school. "They will postpone it until conditions become really unliveable," she observes. For now, most Kyiv residents will do what they have done before: endure. But the calculus is shifting. As winter approaches and Russian strikes continue, the question is no longer whether people will leave, but how many will decide that staying has become impossible.