This Is What Putin Thinks of Trump’s Peace Talks
At about two this morning, the familiar howl of air-raid sirens woke me in the center of Kyiv, followed by the low thuds of anti-aircraft cannons attempting to shoot down Russian drones. The news alerts followed, citing the city’s mayor: Russian strikes had left more than 1,000 apartment buildings without power and heat as temperatures fell below zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Vladimir Putin was not going to miss his chance to use winter as a weapon. In recent weeks, Russian missile strikes have hammered the power grid and neighborhood heating systems, leaving both on the verge of collapse. Last week, President Trump appealed to Putin to pause these attacks for a week, long enough for the cold snap to pass and peace talks to move forward. Putin initially appeared to acquiesce—then launched one of the worst attacks on Ukraine’s energy network since the start of the war.
No one I met in Kyiv over the past few days expected anything different. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches the four-year mark this month, Putin’s strategy has shifted to one that stands in blatant violation of the international laws of war, which prohibit the bombing of civilian infrastructure. Ukrainians aptly call it “energy terror,” and its goal is to freeze them into a state of hopelessness and soften them up for capitulation.
That goal, like most of his aims in this war, has remained out of Putin’s reach. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to push for peace on terms that his people can accept, including firm guarantees from the United States and its allies that they would act decisively to stop any future Russian attack. Over the weekend, as Ukraine’s negotiators met with Zelensky to plan for U.S.-mediated talks with the Russians this week in Abu Dhabi, hundreds of people gathered for a daytime rave on the frozen surface of the Kyiv reservoir, dancing, skating, and racing their cars.
The images from this defiant party masked a deepening exhaustion in the capital. “People are really on the edge,” Yana Markova, the principal of a primary school in Kyiv, told me when I visited her yesterday. The city’s schools have largely stopped holding classes this winter, and Markova has turned her building into a temporary shelter, its cafeteria serving thousands of meals to people whose apartments have no gas, water, power, or heat. “People have different reactions to all this,” she said over a cup of chicken soup. “Some point their anger at the Russians for doing this. Some blame our authorities for failing to protect us.”
On January 9, after the first massive attack of the year on Kyiv’s energy system, the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, urged residents to leave their homes in search of “alternative sources of power and heat.” Temperatures dropped far below freezing that night, and the impact of the bombing “was the most devastating for the capital’s critical infrastructure,” he said in a statement on social media. In many neighborhoods, people sought shelter in subway stations, shivering as they tried to catch a few hours of sleep on yoga mats and camping chairs.
But the metro system does not extend to all parts of the city. The working-class district of Desnianskyi, home to more than a quarter of a million people, consists mostly of high-rise apartment blocks. The blackouts shut down elevators in those buildings, trapping some elderly residents in their freezing homes.
Yesterday evening, about eight hours before the latest wave of strikes on Kyiv, I went to see the head of the district, Maksym Bakhmatov, on the third floor of its administrative building. The ground floor houses the equivalent of a DMV, where people sat around in bulky coats and woolen scarves, some waiting to register their complaints about the lack of basic services. One man used the room’s relative warmth to take a nap.
Bakhmatov sat in his office in three layers of clothes, bracing for the next barrage of Russian strikes. A former television producer, he made his name as a performer on the same comedy circuit as Zelensky, who appointed Bakhmatov to run the Desnianskyi district in May. The official had little hope for the peace talks Trump initiated last year, because the Kremlin has shown no willingness to respect any calls for a cease-fire. “Putin will not stop,” Bakhmatov told me. “His rockets will not run out this year or next year.”
Though his anger was mostly reserved for the Russians, he also had harsh words for the local government, a sign of the political divisions that have deepened as living conditions in Kyiv become more difficult. “The city has sent us zero generators, zero food,” he said. Federal authorities have stepped in to provide emergency assistance, setting up heated tents and food pantries for people in his district.
Read: [Ukraine latest attacks showcase its desperation].
After every bomb that hits the nearby power plant, Bakhmatov follows a frantic routine. He gets a call in the middle of the night, warning him of the impending blackouts. The water in every apartment tower in his district—roughly 800 of them—then needs to be drained from the central heating system before it freezes. Failing to do that within two hours could rupture the pipes inside the walls. It might then take years, he says, for the repairs needed to make the buildings livable again. “They have the same heating system in Russia,” Bakhmatov said. “It was all built in the Soviet Union. Putin knows all its weak spots. He knows exactly where to strike.”
The unfolding catastrophe has long been clear to the people who run Ukraine’s energy sector. In the middle of November, one of its top executives, Maxim Timchenko, traveled to Washington, D.C., to brief U.S. officials and members of Congress. “It’s an absolute disaster,” he told me during that visit. “It’s definitely going to be the worst winter of the war, and there is no solution other than an energy cease-fire. That’s the main message I’m bringing here to all levels.”
As the head of DTEK, the largest private energy company in Ukraine, Timchenko could see that the Russians had carefully selected their targets to maximize the damage not only to Ukraine’s power grid but to its sense of unity. Throughout the fall, their missile strikes destroyed the substations that move electricity from the nuclear-power plants in the western part of Ukraine to the east, where most of the population and heavy industry are concentrated. “They wanted to divide us down the middle,” Timchenko explained. “And in the electricity space, they succeeded.”
Without high-voltage lines to move power across the country, many parts of western Ukraine saw a surplus of electricity this fall and early winter, while the eastern half of the country experienced blackouts lasting as long as 18 hours a day.
As the strikes continued in January and temperatures fell, Zelensky intensified his calls for a partial cease-fire, under which both sides would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure. Trump put his weight behind the proposal last week. “I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week, and he agreed to do that,” he said on January 29. The Ukrainians, Trump added, almost “didn’t believe it, but they were very happy about it.”
The pause in Russian attacks on Kyiv held over the weekend, while other parts of Ukraine suffered more acts of barbarism. On Sunday afternoon, Russian drones attacked a civilian bus owned by DTEK and carrying miners, killing at least 12 people as they rode home from their shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in eastern Ukraine. Still, the weekend saw no Russian missile strikes against Kyiv’s power plants, and Zelensky expressed hope that the respite would lay the groundwork for the next round of talks.
They are due to start tomorrow in Abu Dhabi, and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, as well as his son-in-law Jared Kushner, will be there to mediate. On Saturday, both men met in Florida with the Kremlin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, to discuss the terms of a possible deal. “We are encouraged by this meeting that Russia is working toward securing peace in Ukraine,” Witkoff wrote afterward on social media. The Russians, he added, are grateful for Trump’s “critical leadership in seeking a durable and lasting peace.”
But that gratitude did not count for much against Putin’s desire to extend the suffering of Ukrainians. He sees the coldest days of winter as instruments of war, and he will use them no matter what mercies Trump may request. As the sun set over Kyiv today, the air-raid sirens started to wail again across the city center. People got dressed and headed to the shelters, determined to wait out the cold for one more night.
