How Soviet urban planning helped Russia freeze Ukraine

Ukraine is now experiencing its toughest winter in recent years.

Russia has been attacking energy infrastructure as temperatures plummeted below -15 degrees Celsius in January, leaving around 1 million Ukrainians without heat.

The capital, Kyiv, is a prime target for such attacks. follow Russia’s latest bombing Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said that as of January 24, nearly 6,000 apartment buildings were without heat overnight.

It was Russia’s third attack on Kiev’s heating infrastructure in little more than two weeks, following attacks on January 9-20 that left hundreds of thousands frozen in their apartments.

“Living in Kiev is a bit like a gamble these days,” Rita, a resident of the Ukrainian capital, told the BBC.

“If there is heat and gas, there is no electricity and water. If there is electricity and water, there is no heat.

“Coming home is like playing a guessing game every day – can I take a shower or drink hot tea, or neither? Missiles and drones are the big ones, of course.”

She said she had to wear a hat and several layers of clothing to bed.

What makes things worse in Ukraine and easier in Russia is the prevalence of apartment buildings that rely on communal central heating – water is heated elsewhere and then pumped into radiators.

Heating plants in Ukraine are massive and thousands of people are affected when Russian troops attack their targets. Ukraine says all such power plants have now come under attack.

Such an attack would also disrupt the power supply, but while a generator or battery bank might help in this situation, heating is less straightforward – especially when there’s no electricity to power a heater either.

Kyivteploenergo, a heating and hot water monopoly in the Ukrainian capital, told the BBC that the “vast majority” of homes in Kiev rely on its services. The company said it could not disclose specific figures for security reasons.

In Zaporozhye, a first-tier city with a population of 750,000, nearly three-quarters of residents rely on central heating, said Maksym Rohalsky, chairman of the local association of apartment building residents.

Ukrainian energy expert Yuriy Korolchuk said that before Russia’s full invasion in 2022, about 11 million households in Ukraine relied on central heating, while only 7 million households heated their own homes.

Cities across the Soviet Union, including those in Ukraine, were the focus of a massive construction program launched in the 1950s to mass-produce cheap housing.

The Soviet urban landscape is dominated by ubiquitous precast concrete panel nine-story residential buildings (called “panelki”) or smaller five-story apartment buildings (called “khrushchevki”), named after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who oversaw their construction in the 1950s and 1960s.

Heating for these homes is provided by large plants called TET, short for “thermoelectric central” in Ukrainian, because they both generate electricity and heat.

A detached house occupied by one family, called a “private house” in Ukraine, usually occurs in rural areas and is rare in cities.

“Ukraine inherited the Soviet heating system but did not change anything, it was still mainly centralized,” Korolchuk told the BBC.

“These heating plants are not designed to be attacked by missiles or drones, which is why these vulnerabilities come to the fore during war.”

According to him, this is a new tactic used by Russia.

“In previous winters, there were no such attacks on heating systems. They only happened occasionally, and they were not directly targeted at heating plants,” he added.

Referring to ongoing talks to end the war, he said “negotiation elements may be coming into play now, which is a pressure”.

Large centralized facilities bring efficiencies of scale, but if they are targeted by bombs or drones, the consequences can be devastating for hundreds of thousands of people.

The Ukrainian government is acutely aware of this vulnerability and plans to reduce it by mandating individual heating points in apartment buildings.

However, undoing decades of Soviet urban planning will not be quick or easy.