The alert comes after another night of attacks on electrical infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia oblast in the south and Kharkiv oblast in the east, which have left many residential areas without electricity or heating.
The deadly cold threat caused by attacks on energy grids is becoming a “nationwide emergency… in addition to war,” Mammadzade told reporters in Geneva during a scheduled briefing.
Noting temperatures of -15°C (5°F) in kyiv on Friday, the UNICEF official warned that next week could be even colder, as millions of families across the country live without heat. “Children and families are in constant survival mode because of it,” he said.
Help shift
While the humanitarian focus has so far been on frontline areas, continued Russian attacks on urban infrastructure, including residential areas, have highlighted a much more complicated set of needs among people living in apartment blocks.
Among them is kyiv resident Svitlana, “who is doing her best to take care of her three-year-old daughter, Adina,” on the 10th.th floor of your building. “He told us that he had no heat or electricity for more than three days, and that was in the first week of the interruption (we are already in the second or almost third week) and many families still do not have it,” Mammadzade said.
Echoing those concerns from kyiv, Jaime Wah of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said that while power was restored “within days” following earlier attacks in Kharkiv and Odessa, the situation seemed more difficult in the capital, where he rubbed his hands to keep warm while speaking by video to journalists in Geneva. “In kyiv, we are facing a situation of sustained outages and also a larger number of populations affected by it,” he said.
Nearly four years after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, “children’s lives are still consumed by thoughts of survival and not childhood,” UNICEF’s Mammadzade warned, pointing to an 11 percent increase in verified child victims during 2025, compared to the previous year.
The agency helps vulnerable people in Ukrainian cities by supporting large community tents where they can stay warm and find games and toys to play with.
Families seek warmth and support inside a mobile tent during a winter power outage in kyiv, Ukraine.
“Svitlana can’t bathe Arina or prepare hot food, so she wraps her son in several layers and walks up 10 floors of dark stairs to reach a tent set up outside by the Ukrainian State Emergency Services,” Mammadzade explained. “There they can warm themselves, get hot food, charge devices and talk to a psychologist, or just sit in the heat.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund warns that children are especially vulnerable to the physical and mental impact of living in the dark and facing frigid temperatures, which it says can intensify fear and stress “and can lead to or exacerbate respiratory and other conditions.”
“The youngest are the most vulnerable,” Mammadzade explained. “Newborns and infants lose body heat rapidly and are at increased risk for hypothermia and respiratory illnesses, conditions that can quickly become life-threatening without adequate warmth and medical care.”