Another Take: A cold and dangerous winter
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Al Jazeera Podcasts. Hi, it's Amy Walters, senior producer with The Take, back with another take, where we revisit episodes from the archives. This week, Ukraine. On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump's true social account read, I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for peace if America is involved. He also wrote,

He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for peace. The post was sent out after President Vladimir Zelensky's visit to the White House when the conversation degenerated in front of the press.

And it continued.

but you don't have the cards. But once we sign that deal, you're in a much better position, but you're not acting at all thankful. And that's not a nice thing. I'll be honest, that's not a nice thing. All right, I think we've seen enough. What do you think? This is going to be great television, I will say that. The conversation marked a new low in the U.S. relationship with Ukraine.

Without U.S. support, this could be one of Ukraine's toughest winters yet. On December 14th, 2022, we air this episode about Russia weaponizing winter against Ukraine. All dates and references are from that time. Al Jazeera correspondent Rory Challens arrived in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, on November 23rd. The first thing we did when we got into the city was run up straight upstairs,

Rory had to be on air right away, so he ran out to the balcony and normally if you were watching Al Jazeera, you'd see the lights of Kiev fill the screen behind him. And this cityscape, which normally is all lit up as cityscapes are, you could barely see a light across the whole of Kiev. It looked like the city was left with almost no power at all.

It was very unnerving. Seeing one or two points of illumination was something I'm not ever going to forget, I don't think. Russian airstrikes knocked out the power grid. There was no light, no heat, and in some cases, no water. Snow was just starting to fall, with winter just around the corner. So what will war in the freezing cold mean for the people of Ukraine? ♪

I'm Halimahid Deen and this is The Take. Rory's familiar with winters in this part of the world. In 2014, I was the Moscow correspondent until 2018. Since that time, I've been a sort of roving correspondent.

If I sound a bit hoarse, I apologise. I was just getting over a cold probably brought on by the Ukrainian winter. Let's not forget, it's freezing there, no? It is. It is cold. It's like a, I think, you know, standard temperature at the moment is between zero and minus seven, minus eight. And of course, you've covered this part of the world before. Just from experience, I mean, how cold do you expect it to get? In Kiev, you would...

get kind of deep winter temperatures, perhaps as low as minus 20, which is, I think, roughly minus four Fahrenheit. It's a harsh environment in Ukraine, particularly when a war is going on. Not a lot of people understand really how journalists are getting in and out of Ukraine. Can you just tell us how you got there? From what I understand, it's a long drive and not always a particularly safe one.

Yeah, so there are, for obvious reasons, no flights basically coming into Ukrainian airports at the moment. The airspace is just too dangerous for that.

So I flew to Poland, into Warsaw, and then it was a very long drive across the border to the Ukrainian city of Lviv. And then it's another very long drive from Lviv to Kyiv. Over the last few months, it hasn't been particularly dangerous. But having said that, the journey that we made coincided with a round of cruise missile attacks on the country.

Some of them came into Lviv, where we had just left from. Some of them landed in Kiev, where we were driving to. The government said energy infrastructure, including gas storage facilities, were once again struck. Luckily, none landed on the motorway that we were cruising along. They'd hit the power stations. But not everyone was as lucky.

Six people were killed and dozens injured near Kyiv. This happened shortly after the EU designated Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the results of the strikes tragic. The EU Parliament declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism today. Finally.

I'm grateful to all the European parliamentarians. Then Russia proved it true to the whole world, launching 67 rockets at our infrastructure, at our energy, at regular civilians. And for Rory and the crew, the result was a very dark and gloomy drive into Kiev. The only lights that we could see were the taillights of the cars in front of us.

When we arrived in Kiev, there's a very eerie experience coming into a capital city and there not being any streetlights on, not being any lights on in the buildings. The lights were out as far away as Moldova, which just seems absolutely bonkers. Yeah. I guess it gives a sense of the scale of what Russia is attacking right now. If you take Russia out of the equation, Ukraine is the biggest country in Europe. And these strikes that Russia is launching are countrywide.

So yeah, the impacts of this war are reverberating around the world and they're certainly being felt in nearby countries. Now it sounds really unsettling, the environment you arrived in, all the lights were out, you know, dark, freezing cold. And we have a generator. We're very lucky. But if you're living in a normal Ukrainian apartment block which doesn't have a generator,

You have no lifts, you can't get up to your seventh, eighth, ninth floor apartment without using a lot of stairs. If you're old, you've got small children, then that can make life a real grind. Then you're going to have to use a sort of camping gas stove to do any of your cooking. Aliola lives on the eighth floor. She talked to Rory as she lit her camping stove up. The life is different.

It's a bit strange to live in Kyiv and to use this thing to prepare the tea. She's managing with the help of some Christmas lights that are battery-powered and don't rely on the electricity grid. I have to put them. It's the Christmas atmosphere in November. And if you're unlucky enough to get sick or need surgery, things can go from difficult to downright frightening.

We went to a hospital the other day and interviewed the most famous heart surgeon in Ukraine who was in the middle of a heart operation on a 14-year-old boy when the latest salvo of missiles came in, knocked out the power in the hospital. And of course, no power means no lights.

Luckily, the crucial machines, they had batteries that lasted a couple of hours, but they had to finish the operation with all the surgeons with head torches on doing it in the darkness. That could have gone disastrously wrong, that operation. Luckily, they were good doctors and he was fine. We spoke to him afterwards. He's making a good recovery. But these are things that Ukrainians are living with at the moment and suffering under. You're fortunate you're in a building with a generator. I mean, how common is that to have a generator to keep the lights on and to get some kind of creature comforts going?

I would say it's not a majority of the buildings that have them. You know, to power an apartment building, it has to be a pretty large generator. That's not the kind of thing that you can just run down and pick up from your local hardware store. That's a big thing that probably needs to be delivered on the back of a truck. And it needs to have a serious supply of gasoline to keep it running. But even as cumbersome as they are, there's a market for generators these days.

The price of generators in Ukraine at the moment has gone through the roof. People are going across the border into Poland and further afield to buy up as many as they can and bring them back to Ukraine to sell. There's another group of people who I should mention, who are those who've been bombed out. And if your home's been destroyed, one of the things that if you're lucky enough to have been spotted and provided for, you're now living in a small metal cabin.

And I've seen pictures of these cabins. They're these white boxes with a door and window set up in little prefab villages. Lots of these have been provided by the Polish government, Polish charities. They're basically porter cabins and you get whole families living in them at the moment. But they're also just wired up to the electricity. They have no other means of heating or light or anything like that. So...

When the power goes down, they essentially turn into metal refrigerators, like living in a very cold metal box. It just sounds dreadful. In terms of the infrastructure right now, I mean, these little, you know, porter cabins, I mean, is that enough to house all the displaced people? No. No.

We went to Irpin, which you may have heard of from the early stages of the war. It was one of the suburbs to the west of Kiev, along with Bucha, that the Russians occupied. You know, lots of the...

summary executions and things like that happened in Bucha and Earpin. And in Earpin we walked into a very badly damaged apartment building and this from the outside looked completely uninhabitable and we went in, there was no power, the walls were black with soot from the fire that had basically gutted the place and yet there were people still living there.

They had rigged up a wood-burning stove at the end of the corridor with its chimney going out a smashed window. They were saying in the next few days, the council is going to come along and tear the building down. What they will do after that, I have no idea. It's a very, very uncertain future for a lot of people in Ukraine at the moment. Do you see some kind of strategy here?

Like from the... I mean, because Russia's used to these temperatures as well. They will know this is a bad time of year for your electricity to go out and your heating to go out. Yeah, I mean, they're not doing it just because they feel like it. The intention is to make life very, very uncomfortable for as many people as they can inside Ukraine. Not out of sadism, but because the Russians believe that that will...

either set off another wave of refugees that will put pressure on Western governments, because they will have to house these refugees and provide for them. And the Russians think that the Western governments will then put pressure back on Kiev to sit down at the negotiating table and make the kind of concessions that Russia wants. Or they think that the

The destruction of Ukraine's energy grid will put enough pressure on President Zelensky just by itself to get him to make those concessions that the Russians want him to make. And a cold plate of revenge may play a part as well, Rory says. Ukraine has been doing pretty well on the battlefield over the last four or five months. The joy of liberation, of seeing Ukraine's flag fly again.

The southern port city of Kherson is not the first place to emerge from occupation. Russia has been losing territory, so I think there's a certain amount of desperation in what the Russians are doing at the moment. There is also a community within Russia which is very hardline, very nationalistic, lots of them...

read or write these telegram channel blogs they're known as military bloggers they are a very vocal part of the Kremlin's kind of propaganda landscape they've been arguing for targeting Ukraine's crucial infrastructure for a long time so there is also a domestic angle to this

The Kremlin, in finally doing what it has been told to do by these military bloggers for a long time, is trying to quieten that ultra-nationalistic, ultra-patriotic, ultra-hardline section within its sort of, you know, bloggerati.

And it's not just the cruise missiles, then the ensuing power outages, and then the cold on top of that. There's a very hot war going on too. But with the winter arriving, it's hard to know how that will impact drones, one of the most important fighting forces in this conflict.

This is the world's first full-scale drone war. There are drones being used across the board by individual units on the front lines, largely commercial drones that are used for artillery spotting, targeting, that sort of thing. They also fly a drone over the enemy's trenches and you can drop grenades and other explosives onto the enemy's positions.

There are bigger drones being used for surveillance. The Russians, most notably recently, have been using Iranian drones, particularly the Shaheds. The Ukrainians call them mopeds because of the sound they make when they come over. They sound kind of harsh and loud as they're flying over your head. We'll wait for it.

And these have been doing a reasonable amount of damage to Ukrainian targets. There have been reports of drone strikes, drone strikes inside Russia too. And there have been reports that these drones don't work as well or don't work at all in the cold. Is that true?

Yeah, that was something that one of Ukraine's military officials said fairly recently. How true that is, I don't know. Ukraine claims that Russia has stopped using Iranian-made drones because they failed to operate in cold temperatures.

They certainly haven't been used as much recently, but after this comment was made, there was another round of drone attacks. This is working. I mean, I know winter is still yet to fully get underway, but the Ukrainians don't really strike me as, you know, the kind of people who will just sit down and say, OK, fair enough, let's give in after everything that they've already suffered. I mean, you're there. What are people telling you?

Yeah, I don't get any, any impression at all that this is changing the mind of your average Ukrainian. You know, I've been into cold, chilly, dark apartments and spoken to people about this. And I've said, is this changing your mind? And absolutely not. Do you think the Russians are hoping that these missile attacks hitting the electricity...

will break the will of the people here? I don't know any person who is ready to go to the negotiations with Russians because of missile strikes. They say, you know, if it's a choice between living without electricity and being without Russia, then yeah, if we can be without Russia, then we'll take losing our electricity. It's a small price to pay.

And part of that price to pay is a night-time curfew from 11pm to 5am. But even under these circumstances, when there is power, there are a few Ukrainians who are still brave enough to go out and try and have some fun. You can go raving.

The raving is much more hardcore than I could possibly do at this stage in my life. If you're going curfew raving, you have to be in just before curfew starts and then you can't leave until curfew finishes in the morning. But despite a few Ukrainians' willingness to party through this war, they still want it to end. So what's happening now to try to make that happen? That's after the break.

The Inside Story podcast dissects, analyzes and helps define major global stories. We get into the details with experts who explain how policies affect people. The Inside Story podcast by Al Jazeera. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts. With the EU declaring Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, that opens legal avenues for even more restrictions on Russia to pressure President Vladimir Putin to stop the war.

Russia says the EU decision has nothing to do with the, quote, real situation in the fight against international terrorism. And Putin's vowing more strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. As soon as we move and do something in response, there is this uproar and clamor that spreads throughout the entire universe. This will not interfere with our combat missions.

We're speaking with Al Jazeera correspondent Rory Challens about these attacks as winter sets in and about Russia's strategy overall. Now, the EU is trying to implement a price cap on Russian oil to try and punish Russia financially. The European Union began imposing a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian oil today. But Russia's in this kind of standoff with Europe as well. Is this impacting Russia at all?

In Europe, we were told that these sanctions will cripple Russia and it'll cause them to stop what they're doing. And we're almost a year into this now.

Yeah, well, sanctions don't work overnight. It can take a long time to have the desired effect, or they might not have that desired effect. You know, there are big effects that the sanctions are having on the Russian economy at the moment. So that is going to have, over time, a pretty disastrous effect on the amount of money that Russia has to spend on its defence, but also on many other things.

Education, health, pensions, whatever. It's not pretty and there is going to be a hit taken by your average Russian. And that's not the only hit. Rory knows from covering Russia, a lot of the information they're consuming on TV and on the internet is from the government directly. So many of them aren't seeing what's really going on.

you know, funerals in their hometown for people who've died. The average Russian, I think, is not getting an accurate picture of what the death toll is. But those aren't the only Russians watching this war.

Rory's been talking with younger Russians who've left the country too. Yeah, the people I know who are of my generation speak to their parents back in Russia and it's like they're banging their head against a brick wall. They try to tell them what's really happening and their parents just don't want to know. They won't listen. They

are so firmly convinced that Russia is doing something noble and patriotic and right in Ukraine. It's like two polar opposites and there's no room really for the generations to speak to each other at the moment and it's terribly sad. Propaganda works. Meanwhile in Ukraine, families are preparing for a long, dark and dangerous winter ahead.

We spoke to the mother of a 14-year-old boy who'd been on the operating table when the lights went out. And she said that her first emotion was gratitude, that even under these conditions, the doctors kept operating on her son. And he survived and she still has him.

And then she says that her second emotion was rage. Rage at the Russians for doing this to Ukraine. Rage at the Russians for doing this to her and her family. And she didn't feel like this anger was a natural part of who she was, that it had been forced on her. And she couldn't really forgive the Russians for that. And I think that is how...

A huge number of Ukrainians feel a burning anger that Russia has done this to their country. And they say it's a genocide that they're living through. That's wrong. You hear it time and time again. This is a genocide. And they link it to the Holodomor of 1932, 1933. It was a man-made famine. This is a continuation of it. Gosh, Rory, I mean, what do you make of it all?

Putin is going to have to pull all the stops out to try and win this conflict. And I'd say that the odds are stacked against him. And if Putin loses or loses in the eyes of the Russian people, it's going to have impacts around the world. There are going to be ramifications felt for a long time. And that's The Take.

This episode was produced by Amy Walters, with Chloe K. Lee, Alexandra Locke, Nagin Oliay, Ashish Malhotra, Ruby Zaman, and me, Halima Hayyadeen.

Alex Roldan is our sound designer and Aya El-Malik and Adam Abogad are our engagement producers. Ney Alvarez is our head of audio. And if you like the show, give us a follow on Twitter or Instagram. We're at AJEPodcasts. You can also find out about some of our other shows. We'll be back.