A Ukrainian missile strike has plunged Russia’s border region into a humanitarian crisis as residents endure sub-zero temperatures without electricity, heat, or running water
Belgorod, Russia — January 10, 2026
The lights went out across Belgorod on a Friday night when temperatures had already dropped well below freezing. Within hours, 600,000 people found themselves thrust into a crisis that combined the immediate dangers of a warzone with the creeping threat of a Russian winter without heat.
Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov’s announcement on Telegram was stark and somber. The situation, he said, was “extremely challenging.” Work crews were mobilizing to restore power, heating, and water supplies, but the scale of destruction from the Ukrainian missile strike meant that for many residents, relief would not come quickly.
A City in Darkness
By Saturday evening, the streets of Belgorod city presented an eerie tableau. Where streetlights should have glowed, darkness reigned. Residents picked their way through the gloom using whatever light sources they could muster—hand-held torches, mobile phone screens, the pale beams of car headlights cutting through the winter night. The normal hum and glow of urban life had been replaced by an unsettling quiet, broken only by the crunch of footsteps on frozen ground.
For a region that once boasted a pre-war population of 1.5 million, this latest attack represents not just another chapter in the ongoing conflict, but a potentially catastrophic humanitarian emergency. The simultaneous loss of electricity, heating, and water creates a cascading series of threats that compound with each passing hour.
The Invisible Killers: Cold and Time
When temperatures plunge below freezing, the absence of heat transforms from an inconvenience into a life-threatening emergency with remarkable speed. Hypothermia can begin to set in within hours of exposure to extreme cold, particularly for the most vulnerable: the elderly, the very young, and those with pre-existing health conditions.
Without electricity, apartment buildings lose more than just lights. Electric heating systems fall silent. Water pumps stop working. Elevators freeze in place, trapping elderly residents in high-rise apartments. Refrigerated medications spoil. Medical equipment requiring power becomes useless. Mobile phones die, cutting off communication with emergency services and loved ones.
The loss of water compounds these dangers. Dehydration accelerates in cold weather, even as the body works harder to maintain core temperature. Hospitals and care facilities face impossible choices about rationing their reserves. Fire services lose the ability to respond effectively to emergencies—a particularly acute concern when residents turn to candles, gas stoves, and improvised heating methods that dramatically increase fire risk.
A Pattern of Infrastructure Warfare
Belgorod’s current crisis cannot be understood in isolation. The region, which borders Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast, has endured regular attacks since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Its geographic position—a mere stone’s throw from the front lines—has made it both a staging ground for Russian military operations and a recurring target for Ukrainian forces.
But the systematic targeting of power infrastructure represents a broader strategic shift in the conflict. Both sides have increasingly turned to attacks on electrical grids, heating systems, and water facilities as a means of applying pressure. Russia has bombarded Ukraine’s power infrastructure throughout the war, causing rolling daily blackouts that have left millions of Ukrainians struggling through multiple winters with intermittent electricity and heat.
Just days before the Belgorod strike, a Thursday night attack on Kyiv left approximately half of the Ukrainian capital’s apartment blocks without heating. The symmetry is grim: civilians on both sides of the border finding themselves victims of the same brutal calculus, where destroying the systems that sustain modern life becomes a weapon of war.
The Human Cost of Cold
Inside darkened Belgorod apartments, residents now face decisions that would have seemed unthinkable in peacetime. Do you burn furniture to stay warm, risking carbon monoxide poisoning? Do you leave your apartment to seek shelter elsewhere, potentially separating from elderly family members who cannot easily move? Do you use up precious mobile phone battery to call for help, or conserve it for a potential evacuation order?
For families with young children, the calculus becomes even more desperate. Infants cannot regulate their body temperature effectively and are among the first to succumb to cold exposure. Parents must make impossible choices about how to keep their children warm with dwindling resources.
Healthcare facilities face their own mounting crisis. Hospitals in the affected areas must continue caring for patients even as their own infrastructure fails. Backup generators, if available, provide only limited power and require fuel that may be difficult to obtain. Surgeries may need to be postponed. Life-support systems may have to be prioritized. Patients who cannot be adequately cared for need to be evacuated—but to where, and how, in a city without functioning traffic lights or street lighting?
The Long Road to Recovery
Governor Gladkov’s acknowledgment that the situation is “extremely challenging” hints at the complex reality facing repair crews. Restoring power after a missile strike is not simply a matter of flipping switches. Damaged transformers must be replaced. Severed power lines must be restrung. Water mains that have frozen and burst must be repaired. Each task becomes exponentially harder in sub-zero temperatures, in the dark, potentially under the threat of further attacks.
International humanitarian law theoretically protects civilian infrastructure, but in practice, both sides have justified attacks on power systems as legitimate military objectives—arguing that electricity powers military communications, logistics, and weapons systems. The civilians who suffer when the lights go out find little comfort in these legal distinctions.
A Winter Without End
As repair crews work through the frozen nights in Belgorod, a larger question looms: how many more times will this happen? The pattern has become grimly predictable. Attack. Darkness. Desperate cold. Frantic repairs. A return to fragile normalcy. Then another attack begins the cycle anew.
For the 600,000 residents currently without power, heat, or water, the immediate concern is survival. But for the region as a whole, each attack erodes not just infrastructure but the social fabric itself. How long can communities endure this relentless pressure? How many winters can be spent in darkness before the breaking point arrives?
In the streets of Belgorod tonight, residents huddle together, share what resources they have, and wait for the lights to come back on. Some will wait in homes that grow colder by the hour. Some will seek shelter with friends or relatives. Some, particularly the elderly and infirm, may not survive the wait.
This is the reality of infrastructure warfare in the 21st century: not the dramatic spectacle of bombs and bullets, but the slow, grinding catastrophe of cities going dark in the depths of winter, and the ordinary people who must somehow endure until the power returns—if it returns at all.
As of publication, authorities have not provided a timeline for when full power, heating, and water services will be restored to Belgorod region. Temperatures are expected to remain below freezing for at least the next week.