Greetings from Kyiv, where candles are the last option during wartime blackouts
Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
I lit this candle at our bureau in Kyiv last month, after one long power outage left us in frigid darkness for hours. But we are lucky. For many in Kyiv, this winter’s heat and electricity blackouts last for days.
The fourth winter of Russia’s war on Ukraine has been the most brutal in recent times, and the Russians have weaponized this by repeatedly attacking Ukraine’s energy grid.
Candles are now a last option for light when emergency power sources fail.
They also hint at loss. “February … is sobbing,” the Ukrainian poet Iya Kiva wrote of the “damned winter” in 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion began, “and the candle drips on the table, burning and burning.”
Ukrainians say they will survive this phase of Russia’s war too. They sleep with their coats on, sometimes under piles of blankets, swaddle their babies in insulated layers warmed by hot water bottles, and gather their families to cook borsch on portable campfire stoves.
The Russian strikes on the energy grid keep coming. One more hit early Tuesday morning. The temperature was -21 degrees C (-6 degrees F). A new low.
See more photos from around the world:
- Greetings from Mumbai, where residents take breathing space where they can find it
- Greetings from Kalk Bay, a South African fishing village where wild seals await scraps
- Greetings from Acre, Israel, where an old fortress recalls the time of the Crusades
- Greetings from a Paris park, where a lone sequoia tree is a marvel to behold
- Greetings from Vienna, where an imperial palace hosts a holiday market for all
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