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The next day, I had to send a finished report to my editor before noon. There was still a lot to do. I could have stayed at my laptop until midnight without thinking twice. But by 10:30 p.m., my laptop battery was completely dead. My small portable power station had run out, too. Then the internet went down. Both Wi-Fi and mobile data stopped working.
The neighborhood cafés — the ones running on gasoline generators, where you can recharge and keep working — had already closed. And that day’s outage in my building, after a recent Russian strike on the capital’s energy facilities, lasted 18 hours. It had been like that for two weeks. In the building across the street, my cousin went 28 hours without electricity; then power came back for an hour and a half in the middle of the night — and went out again for more than 20.
I was luckier than many. My building has gas, which meant I could at least cook. In those days, my sister and a friend came by just to make something hot, fill a thermos with boiling water, and warm up for a while. In my apartment, the temperature somehow held at around 13 degrees Celsius [55 degrees Fahrenheit]. In their building, it hadn’t risen above 8 degrees Celsius [46 degrees Fahrenheit] for two weeks.
So, when every device I owned had gone dead — even my little power station — I decided to go to bed early. The plan was simple: wake up at first light, head down to the local café with a generator and reliable internet, and finish the story before deadline, by daylight.
But I had barely settled into bed when the air-raid siren began to wail outside my window. Half asleep, I reached for my phone to check what, exactly, was heading toward Kyiv. It’s a familiar nighttime reflex here. Telegram channels that track updates from Ukraine’s Air Force post real-time warnings — where drones and missiles are moving, and which regions are under threat. That evening, monitoring channels were already warning that a large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine was likely overnight. Which city will be the target usually becomes clear only once the alert is underway.
Around midnight, the first wave is often kamikaze drones. Then, closer to 2 a.m., missiles join in, launched from different directions. Russia has learned to time attacks so that weapons fired from separate points converge on the same city at roughly the same moment. On the ground, it adds up to one thing: a long night in which you listen and try to guess from the sound how close death has passed — or landed.
I tried to fall asleep again, hoping for at least a couple of hours before it started. I couldn’t. And around 1:30 a.m., it became clear: Tonight’s target was Kyiv and its energy infrastructure. Outside, the temperature had dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius [minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit]. Previous strikes had already left millions in the capital without electricity, water or heat; thousands of high-rise buildings were barely holding on. In nights like this, the logic of terror feels brutally simple: hit power and heating in the deepest cold, and you try to freeze a city into exhaustion — to break people through fear and depletion.
First came the low, heavy hum — drones flying unusually close to the roof. Then explosions rolled through the neighborhood. Some targets were intercepted, others made it through. Later, the building began to tremble with heavier impacts — missiles hitting the same kinds of sites. In the hallway, where I stood for safety, doors slammed from the shockwaves. I barely slept that night. But I made it to morning.
Early the next morning, I grabbed my laptop and hurried to the nearest café to finish my work. The espresso machine was already working nonstop, and almost every table was taken by people hunched over laptops.
On blackout days, cafés running on generators become, for many, the only place where you can work at all, charge your devices, catch a stable internet signal and simply get warm. In a way, it’s also a lifeline for small businesses. After nights like that, in temperatures like this, people drink tea and coffee by the liter — if they can afford it. Many cannot.
For older people, portable power stations are out of reach, and even a regular stop at a café can be too expensive. And then there is the physical reality: climbing to the 15th or 20th floor without an elevator, carrying water, food and medicine up the stairs.
In moments like these, you realize: Being a freelance journalist in Kyiv during rolling blackouts is hard. But it’s far harder to be elderly, to live with a disability or to be a mother with small children. For them, this winter has become an endurance test — physical and moral.
Read more of Ms. Klochko’s reporting in “When the Grid Goes Down,” in the March 2026 edition of ONE.