Russian attacks leave Ukrainian children without heat or electricity, and parents left without options with schools closed

Kiev— On a bitterly cold Wednesday in the Heroiv Dnipra neighborhood of kyiv, Mariana Kiriluk, a podiatrist in her mid-thirties, didn’t know what to do with her ten-year-old son Zahar. Schools in the Ukrainian capital are closed until February as Russian strikes have left half the city without power.

Like for thousands of other families, the power outages also mean it’s bitterly cold for Zahar and his mother, with temperatures dropping below five degrees Fahrenheit.

“Sometimes I take him to work with me. Sometimes I have to leave him alone at home. It’s very hard: there’s no electricity, there’s no heat,” Kiriluk told News themezone.

• Russia sticks to demand that Ukraine leave its territory as US pushes for peace deal

This week, Zahar spent most days in a tent the Ukrainian Red Cross set up in front of the family’s apartment building, one of 1,300 “invincibility points” across the city. The shelter has heaters, phone charging stations, and WiFi.

Kiriluk sneaked away from work every day to check on Zahar, and during a recent visit, she discovered that he had created a TikTok account to share his experiences with the Red Cross.

The tent in front of his house, Kiriluk told News themezone with a smile, is “not a long-term solution.”

Getting kids back to school

Since Russia launched its large scale invasion In February 2022, the lives of children in Ukraine were disproportionately affected. As of October 2025, Ukrainian authorities said that some 3,500 educational institutions had been damaged and more than 700,000 children had been displaced from their homes.

Ukrainian officials and charities have sought opportunities to insulate children from the impacts of war, focusing on resuming in-person classes across the country.

“After the pandemic… and now the invasion, there is a generation of primary school children who have never seen a real school,” Viktoriia Zhydyk, a representative of SaveED, Ukraine’s largest educational nonprofit, told News themezone. “Kids are supposed to be in class, have community, talk to each other… We’re trying to fundamentally change the situation for kids in catastrophic circumstances.”

But in kyiv, resuming in-person instruction means addressing the power outages the capital frequently faces. In 2025, Russia carried out 612 attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and kyiv faced more than 100 days of power outages, according to the kyiv City State Administration.

“All schools have been prepared during this invasion,” Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko told News themezone on Thursday. “We have generators ready to operate independently of the central heating system and central electricity.”

Last year, the city’s efforts to get municipal schools back up and running allowed nearly 300,000 children to return to classrooms.

Longer blackouts

However, in January those preparations proved insufficient. Russia escalated its attacks on January 9 and the city has struggled to return heat, electricity and running water to its residents.

As of Thursday, Klitschko said around 3,000 residential buildings in kyiv remained without heat, including many apartment complexes housing thousands of people, prompting officials to extend the Christmas and New Year school holidays into February.

The current blackouts have been brutally prolonged and have tested the city’s ability to cope.

kyiv is “not prepared to go days without power,” Jamie Wah, deputy head of the kyiv delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told News themezone.

Schools and hospitals are Red Cross priorities, and Wah said addressing their needs has already meant “drawing on emergency resources.”

Families trapped between city and state

Mayor Klitschko said kyiv residents have told him that closing schools and daycares creates more stress after enduring nearly four years of war.

“Parents complain that their children are alone at home,” he says. “If we have an air [raid] alarm, there is no one to take the children to a shelter.

It is a particular concern for the many Ukrainian families with members serving in the military.

“My husband has been on the front lines since the first days of the war,” Kiriluk told News themezone. “He rarely has vacations… so it’s just me taking care of the kids.”

To add another layer of complication, political power in the capital has been divided between Mayor Klitschko and a military administrator appointed by President Zelenskyy, and it remains unclear which authorities are ultimately responsible for achieving the reopening of the city’s public facilities.

“Very little has been done in the capital. And even in these last few days I have not seen enough efforts; all this must be urgently corrected,” President Zelenskyy said last week.

Klitschko said he could not make decisions about reopening schools because they are within the jurisdiction of the central government.

“We plan to open schools next week,” he said, but “this is the decision of the central government and we must follow this decision.”

Until schools and daycares reopen, Zahar will spend more days in the Red Cross invincibility tents, where his hosts welcomed his publicity on social media.

“Thank you for your good heart and your desire to help! We are happy to meet you,” commented the Ukrainian Red Cross in one of its recent TikToks.