Trump says Putin won’t fire on Ukrainian cities because of the deep freeze

President Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed not to fire on cities and towns in Ukraine because of the extreme cold in the war-ravaged country.

“I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week, and he agreed to do that,” Mr. Trump said at Thursday’s Cabinet meeting. “He agreed to do that, and I have to tell you, it was very nice.”

Mr. Trump said his advisers told him not to call because Mr. Putin was unlikely to agree to his proposal.

“And he did it because on top of everything else, that’s not what [Ukrainians] need is missiles coming into their towns and cities,” Mr. Trump continued. “I thought it was a very, very good thing.”

Ukraine is in the midst of a freezing winter, with temperatures reaching 20 degrees below zero.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that more than half of the capital, Kyiv, had no electricity in the wake of Russian strikes on energy facilities.

Russia’s renewed pressure on Kyiv has fractured a power grid already weakened by years of war, with Ukrainian power company Ukrenergo acknowledging the energy situation had “significantly worsened,” forcing emergency outages across most regions.

Oleksandr Kharchenko, a Kyiv-based energy expert and the director of the Energy Industry Research Center, said the latest phase of Russia’s campaign has exposed a familiar weakness in a new way. The same energy facilities have been targeted repeatedly throughout the war, but attacks now arrive with such intensity that Ukraine’s air defenses cannot reliably blunt the impact.

“The situation is extremely complicated,” Mr. Kharchenko said. “We lost a significant amount of generation capacity, including inside Kyiv, which is critical both for electricity and for heating.”

According to Mr. Kharchenko, the damage is less about improved Russian targeting and more about sheer volume. “They attacked the same facilities they have targeted many times before,” he said. “The difference is the scale. It was never 18 missiles in one wave that could reach their targets.”

Ballistic missiles, which are harder to intercept, have played a particularly destructive role. When even a small number get through, they can disable equipment that then takes weeks or longer to replace.

Joshua Kroeker, a Kyiv resident and CEO of risk consultancy group “Reaktion Group,” said recent strikes left some parts of the city relatively intact while others were plunged into prolonged outages.

“Some parts of the city were hit much harder than others,” Mr. Kroeker said. “The right bank was a little better off — some areas never lost power at all. But in my apartment in central Kyiv, we had no water, no heating and no electricity for several days.”

At last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Maxim Timchenko, head of the Ukrainian energy company DTEK, framed the attacks in blunt terms and used the platform to press for urgent international action: “These are targeted attacks against civilian infrastructure,” Mr. Timchenko told attendees in Switzerland. “It’s not related to any military infrastructure or military enterprises. It’s purely terror against our people.”

He cited the intensity of strikes on individual facilities. “Just last week, one of our power stations was attacked by five ballistic missiles and 26 drones,” he said. “None of our defense systems can protect infrastructure from this level of intensity.”

Recent diplomatic efforts have moved into high gear even as Russian strikes continue. Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. have resumed trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, the first of their kind at this level since the invasion began, with discussions focused on territorial disputes and broader security guarantees rather than an immediate ceasefire.

Negotiations are poised to resume on Sunday amid doubts about Moscow’s commitment to a settlement — especially in light of the attacks on Ukraine’s power grid.

In winter conditions, electricity outages alone are survivable. Heating failures, however, are not. That distinction, Mr. Kharchenko warned, is where blackouts become life-threatening.

“If the heating system is destroyed and even 1 million people are left without heat in minus-20 degrees Celsius, many of them are at real risk of freezing,” he said.

For residents such as Mr. Kroeker, the answers to two simple questions determine whether families can remain in their apartments: Is there water? Is there heat?

“If we see further attacks in the next week or two, the situation could deteriorate very quickly,” he said. “We’re already seeing stretches of four or five days without electricity, heating or even running water in some areas.”

Mr. Kharchenko argues that the stakes go well beyond inconvenience or economic disruption. Strikes on heating infrastructure, he says, carry an explicitly lethal dimension in a city of high-rise buildings and older residents.

 

• Guillaume Ptak reported from Kyiv, Jeff Mordock from Washington.