SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (AP) — Vildana Mutevelić huddled in her apartment with her two young children and older cousins. They had no heating, electricity or running water when artillery shells ripped the roof off their building and nearly killed them.
To survive, she improvised.
Mutevelić made a lamp from used motor oil, water and a shoelace as a fuse. She cooked on a fire fueled by books, furniture, shoes or clothes. A plastic spoon, she discovered, worked well as a temporary flashlight when she went outside. Plastic sheeting covered the blown-out windows, a thin buffer against the bitter cold. Her world news came from a neighbor who powered a radio with a car battery.
“The electricity went out immediately,” Mutevelić, 70, said through a translator. “And everything we had in our freezers melted. Those were actually our stocks. That’s all.”
For Mutevelić, these are memories from three decades ago, when Bosnian Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo and killed thousands of civilians. But it’s all happening again in Ukraine. Russian forces have focused their firepower on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as winter weather sets in.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has accused Russia of “energy terrorism”, said earlier this week that about 9 million people were without electricity. act of genocide, the most heinous of war crimes.
“We are convinced that the crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine bear all the hallmarks of genocide,” Kostin said in a statement. “The aggressor state ‘weapons winter’ and deprives Ukrainians of basic services – electricity, water and heating.”
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This story is part of an AP/FRONTLINE investigation that includes the interactive experience War Crimes Watch Ukraine and the documentary “Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes” on PBS.
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Letting civilians suffer and die as a way to force their government to give in is not a new war strategy. But it is prone to failure. Families, neighbors and entire communities unite, brainstorm and resist. Like Sarajevo did. And as Britain did when the island nation refused to give in to Nazi Germany’s devastating attacks 80 years ago.
“The ability of a modern population to survive under coercion and aggression, simply by the willingness to persist, is sometimes underestimated,” said Bruno Tertrais, a geopolitics advisor at the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank.
Ukrainians show the same determination and ingenuity. Larysa Shevtsova’s apartment in the southern city of Kherson in Ukraine lost its electricity and water. But gas was still flowing into a stove in the cramped kitchen. With two fireproof bricks and advice from a family friend, she and her husband were able to keep the temperature in the house bearable without being tied to the kitchen.
They had placed a stone directly on one of the stove’s four burners, the three others under large pans and a kettle. When the rectangular block was warm enough, it was carefully carried to the living room and placed on a Soviet-era stove that had stopped working. Shevtsova, her husband and two sons, one of them 3 years old, huddled around the stone for warmth that would last about 30 minutes.
“We use this method to heat the room,” Shevtsova said. “Before that, we just froze.”
Drawing from a variety of sources, The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” have independently documented more than 40 attacks by Russia on Ukraine’s electricity, heat, water and telecommunications facilities since February.
The scope of Russia’s route of destruction is not limited to one region of Ukraine. From east to west, Russia has unleashed an onslaught of drone and missile strikes designed to inflict maximum damage on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a drastic increase in attacks since September, according to AP’s analysis of the data.
The repeated attacks have gotten Ukrainians used to daily blackouts to avoid overloading the system as temperatures continue to fall.
“We need to be clear about what Russia is doing,” President Joe Biden said at a joint press conference with Zelenskyy last week at the White House. “It is deliberately attacking Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and destroying the systems that provide the Ukrainian people with heat and light during the coldest, darkest part of the year.”
Russia does not appear to be slowing down its attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid. Russian President Vladmir Putin said the waves of attacks are in response to an Oct. 8 truck bombing on the bridge connecting mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The World Health Organization estimates that 2 to 3 million Ukrainians will leave their homes this winter in search of warmth and safety.
“It is absolutely true that terrorizing the civilian population, to break their morale, to make them demand surrender from their leaders, is not a form of military necessity,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a University of Notre Dame professor. Dame professor of law and expert on international law. “Even if you attack a military target, if the intent is to terrorize civilians, you have committed a war crime.”
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February, Moscow has carried out 168 missile strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, according to Kostin, nearly 80 percent of them in October, November and December. Ukraine’s state-controlled oil and gas company Naftogaz reported earlier this month that more than 350 of its facilities and 450 kilometers (279 mi) of gas pipelines suffered damage.
Russia made Ukraine’s power grid its primary target “because it is the easiest way to disrupt civilization and cause a humanitarian catastrophe,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the CEO of the state-owned NEC Ukrenergo, told the AP. Without electricity, he said, basic services and other critical infrastructure sectors, such as communications and healthcare, are crippled.
“No transmission system operator in the world has ever encountered destruction on this scale,” Kudrytskyi said.
NEC Ukrenergo has described on Facebook how hundreds of its technicians and specialists are dispatched to restore power when it is down to “patch what can be patched and replace what can be replaced”. But it can sometimes be a Sisyphus job. Russian shelling in early December cut power to much of the newly liberated Ukrainian city of Kherson just days after it was restored.
Sarajevans experienced the same descent into darkness and cold in the mid-1990s when Serb forces laid siege to the Bosnian capital during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. Like Ukraine, Bosnia faced an existential threat from a neighboring nation seeking to control the country by splitting it up.
A striking difference between Sarajevo and Ukraine is the reaction of the Western world.
For nearly four years, Sarajevo’s population of approximately 350,000 was trapped and subjected to daily shelling and sniper attacks. Cut off from regular access to electricity, heat and water, they survived on limited humanitarian aid from the United Nations as they drank from wells and foraged for food.
Fearing more bloodshed and seeking a political solution, the United States and the European Community, the predecessor of the European Union, supported a UN arms embargo against the former Yugoslavia that prevented the Bosnian government from acquiring weapons to fight back against Serbian attacks.
Money and weapons are flowing for Ukraine. The United States has provided or pledged billions of dollars in military aid, including a Patriot surface-to-air missile battery, the most powerful weapon pledged to Ukraine to date.
“Ukraine has weapons. And what we got then was an embargo on weapons,” says Mirza Mutevelić, Vildana Mutevelić’s 38-year-old son. “I consider this another injustice.”
Lamija Polic, a retired nurse in Sarajevo, dodged bullets to get water and used a metal garbage can as a cooking device. Firewood was hard to find. By the summer of 1993, most of Sarajevo’s trees were gone and people were digging up stumps.
“So we burned everything we had: slippers, shoes, old clothes, books, you name it,” said Pol. “We heated the smallest room in our apartment, the kitchen, and spent all the time there. You make a fire, but it only lasts a few minutes and then you wait until you can’t stand the cold to start another fire. I remember our blankets and sheets were so cold you felt like they were wet.”
Some residents of Kherson, a city on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine, are facing similar hardships. The only regional capital to be seized by Moscow’s troops, the city fell to Russian hands in the early days of the invasion, and was occupied for nearly nine months.
When they retreated in November, Russian forces destroyed power lines and other key infrastructure, sending thousands of newly liberated Kherson residents into darkness.
Larysa, who refused to use her last name for fear of reprisals against her family, told the AP in late November that she sometimes felt she was having a nervous breakdown.
Unlike many homes that can run on gas, Larysa’s home relied solely on electricity. So when Russian soldiers damaged energy supply lines, she and her husband were left in the dark, unable to cook or take hot showers. So they ate canned mackerel, pâté and meatless porridge in the dark of their freezing apartment.
About once a week, Larysa went to a friend’s house who still had gas to wash her hair with warm water and eat a home-cooked meal. She and her husband wanted to buy a portable generator, but prices had jumped from about $190 to more than $1,600, Larysa said.
“I’m tired of all this and want my old life back,” said Larysa.
In Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, Mariia Modzolevska relies on a generator and car battery to keep her cafe, Blukach, running during the near-daily blackout.
Customers are still coming in. They charge their mobile phones and other gadgets while drinking the cafe’s coffee and eating the sweet little bites. Modzolevska, 34, thought of ways to keep her shop running. An old, charged car battery keeps the credit card machine running. A diesel generator powers the espresso machines.
“We were making money until the first drone strike and blackouts, then revenues dropped more than 30 percent,” she said. “Since we provided the coffee shop with electricity and internet, it has taken off again. I don’t know how long we can be active in (the) future.”
Tetiana Boichenko’s corner apartment in Kiev faces north. Even in November it was cold in her bedroom. Heat and electricity came and went around her, depending on whether Russian missiles hit their targets.
Boichenko bought a small tent for $10 and put it on her bed. In the tent, on top of some blankets, Boichenko was 3 to 4 degrees warmer than the temperature of her room. Boichenko said she has no plans to tear down her tent before spring.
“I’ll sleep in it because it’s warm,” she said. ___
Dupuy reported from New York, Lardner from Washington and Niksic from Sarajevo. Associated Press writers Sam Mednick and Inna Varenytsia in Kherson, and Jamey Keaten in Kiev contributed to this report.
