Ukraine braces for 'toughest winter' as Russia targets energy infrastructure

Alexander De Croo, the third-ranking official at the United Nations, arrived in Ukraine with a stark assessment: the country is heading into what will be its harshest winter since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Speaking to the BBC on the ground, De Croo, who previously served as Belgium's prime minister and now leads the UN development agency, laid out a scenario that keeps international officials awake at night—one where systematic Russian attacks on power plants and water systems leave millions without heat as temperatures drop to minus 20 degrees Celsius, creating conditions he described as approaching humanitarian catastrophe.

The calculus is brutal and simple. Russia has spent months methodically targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure—power transmission lines, substations, generation facilities—alongside strikes on civilian areas like shopping malls, petrol stations, and business centers. In recent weeks, the tempo has accelerated. Russia has deployed faster, jet-powered drones that Ukrainian air defenses struggle to intercept, launching them in round-the-clock waves. Ukraine, for its part, continues striking Russian territory, focusing on oil and gas distribution networks and industrial facilities. Both nations deny deliberately targeting civilians, yet the casualty counts tell a different story. On Thursday alone, a Russian drone strike on a shopping mall in Pavlohrad killed five people and wounded 67. Earlier in the week, similar attacks on malls in Zaporizhzhia and Sumy left two dead and 28 wounded. A Ukrainian seaborne drone attack on the Russian resort city of Sochi wounded 28 people. Two more died when Russian drones hit a border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova.

What makes this winter uniquely perilous, De Croo explained, is that Ukraine is entering it from what he called "a very weak base." Last winter's damage to the energy system was severe and only partially repaired. The UN Development Programme has been working to rebuild sections of the network and establish smaller, decentralized power plants designed to be less attractive targets. But the work is agonizingly slow. Reconstruction crews operate under constant air raid sirens, fully aware they are working at sites Russia has marked for destruction. Some days, workers cannot continue at all because the danger is simply too acute. De Croo called completing these repairs "almost an impossible task."

The stakes are not abstract. If Russia succeeds in crippling Ukraine's power infrastructure before winter arrives, the consequences cascade through every system that keeps a modern society functioning. Heating systems fail. Water treatment plants shut down. Sewage systems back up. Hospitals lose power. In a country where winter temperatures regularly plummet below freezing, such a collapse would create what De Croo termed circumstances "really close to humanitarian catastrophe." The UN is "very, very worried," he said, about what this winter could become.

The timing adds another layer of urgency. Just days before De Croo's visit, U.S. President Donald Trump sent envoys to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin and to Kyiv to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky. The diplomatic overtures have not slowed the fighting. If anything, the intensity of attacks has only increased. Ukraine and Russia remain locked in a war that has now raged for more than four and a half years, with no negotiated settlement in sight. As autumn turns to winter, the race to repair what Russia destroys becomes a race against both the calendar and an adversary determined to make survival itself a daily ordeal.