Hot-water bottles, sleeping bags and camping gas

For nine days, three-year-old Dasha has lived in a flat with no heating. Each night, her mother Iryna places two five-litre plastic bottles filled with hot water into Dasha’s cot — makeshift hot-water bottles to help her daughter sleep.

To heat the water, Iryna uses a small camping gas canister. She cooks porridge on it too. The family lives in Kyiv’s Dnipro district, an area hit during a large-scale attack on critical infrastructure.

Across Kyiv and the country, millions of families are enduring prolonged disruptions to heating, electricity and water, at a time when temperatures in some places have dropped as low as –18°C.

Cold with nowhere to hide

“Today, for the first time in days, we had electricity for an hour,” Iryna says. “We barely managed to charge our phones. Water comes and goes. But the hardest part is the lack of heat.”

She points to damaged radiators in the building. “They tried to restart the heating yesterday, but the pipes burst throughout the house. You can see huge cracks on the radiators — they’re ruined.”

Some of the windows in the family’s flat are covered with plywood. The glass blew out from the blast wave. Dasha’s grandfather, Anatolii, 72, is repairing the balcony, trying to seal the gaps so even more cold doesn’t seep inside.

For Iryna and Anatolii, the past nine days have become a single task: keeping a child warm. Iryna layers Dasha in pyjamas and a fur-lined waistcoat, then wraps her in several blankets.

“I can’t bathe her, she starts shivering from the cold,” Iryna says, exhausted. “At home, in warm clothes, with hot-water bottles and blankets, she eventually warms up. But you should see how she cries when we have to go down to the shelter.”

The family does not ignore air raid alerts. Their building has been shelled more than once. But each trip to the basement is another test for a small child. If the temperature inside their flat hovers around +13°C, in the dark, non-residential shelter it barely reaches +5°C.

“Dasha cries and says the air raids won’t let her sleep,” Iryna says, lifting her daughter into her arms. Dasha buries her face in her mum’s chest — her mother’s hug is the warmest place in the home.

“I really want the lights to come back”

In another part of Kyiv, Tetiana returns from a shopping centre with her eight-year-old son Yehor, where they went to charge phones and warm up. While they were out, frost spread across the windows of Yehor’s ground-floor bedroom.

“It’s been cold at home for many days,” Yehor says. “So I keep a torch on. These days I sleep in my clothes, and mum covers me with a sleeping bag. And I really want the lights to come back. I want to go to school, because my friends are there. At home it’s dark and sad.”

Tetiana says her son struggles most with the darkness. Yehor has a disability related to his eyesight, and in low light he can barely see.

“We had no electricity at all for four days,” she says. “Now they switch it on for a couple of hours, but it’s not enough to heat the flat. Frost keeps forming on the windows.”

A warm tent that feels “almost like nursery"

To help residents cope, SESU has set up warming points across Kyiv. In the bright orange tents, families can warm up, eat hot food, charge devices, and speak to a psychologist — or simply sit somewhere heated and safe.

UNICEF has supported these warming points with psychosocial support materials, including toys and board games, so children can play, decompress and regain a sense of normality — helping both children and adults cope better with stress, fear and the biting cold.

Inside one tent, four-year-old Mila plays with her friend, shaping colourful animals from modelling clay.

Mila’s kindergarten was damaged by shelling — windows were blown out, and there is no heating. “The kindergarten is closed,” says Mila’s 68-year-old grandfather, Viktor Mykolaiovych. “Her parents are at work. At home we had no electricity for four days. What is a small child meant to do in the dark and cold? So I brought her here — to warm up and be around other children. It’s good these places exist.”

An SESU worker offers Viktor a hot tea and hands Mila a biscuit. The girl takes it, smiles, and says: “It’s almost like my nursery.”

In a couple of hours, Mila and her grandfather will climb the dark stairwell back to their flat on the 12th floor — without electricity, the lift does not work. But for a little while, warmth and play allow a child to forget the harsh conditions she has lived with for more than a week.

UNICEF’s winter response started months ago and builds on investments made in previous years, as well as scaled-up support following the latest emergency situation. This includes: 

• Strengthening district heating systems and bolstering energy supplies to reduce disruptions and keep water flowing, hospitals functioning and heating running.  
• Winter cash assistance targeting 320,000 people, including 145,000 children so parents can prioritize their children’s urgent needs.
• Winter grants to 1,500 educational facilities to help them conduct urgent upgrades to stay open and ensure a more child-friendly environment for some 445,000 students.

UNICEF’s winter response is made possible thanks to the vital support of partners including Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through KfW, the UK Government, the European Union, the US Government, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Government of Sweden and the Danish Government.