Inside Ukraine’s blackouts: Solar power kits become lifeline as Putin's attacks leave families without power, water and heat

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It can mean water stops reaching the upper floors of apartment blocks. Lifts stop working. Electric cookers become useless, heating disappears and eventually phones run out of charge, cutting people off from relatives, and from the warnings telling them when another Russian missile or drone attack is heading towards their city.

For parents with young children, elderly people and those reliant on electrically powered medical equipment, hours without electricity can quickly become something much more serious.

Now thousands of Ukrainian families are being given solar-powered energy kits in an attempt to provide a small degree of independence from the grid as the country prepares for another winter after years of Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure.

Yuriy Boyechko, founder and CEO of Hope for Ukraine, told LBC the units have already become a lifeline for families living closest to the war.

“Solar energy resilient kits that Hope for Ukraine is distributing to families in Ukraine have been a lifesaver to so many families, specifically those that live close to frontlines,” he said.

“Since January of 2025, we have distributed over 2,600 of these solar energy resilient kits to families that are most affected.”

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The kits combine a battery power station with a solar panel, allowing families to store electricity when the grid briefly comes back online or generate their own power when it does not.

They have become particularly valuable in high-rise apartment blocks, where conventional petrol or diesel generators cannot safely be used.

“If they have power in the grid for an hour or two hours a day, they are able to plug in the unit into the grid via the hookup that we provide,” Boyechko said.

“And then they are able to charge the unit, and then they can run on that backup solar power generator for up to eight hours.”

For Yuliia, a mother living in Kharkiv with her six-month-old daughter Yelyzaveta, those hours of electricity can make the difference between being able to carry out the most basic parts of everyday life and simply waiting for the grid to return.

She described how a complete blackout can leave families on upper floors without running water, while water heaters, refrigerators and electric cookers stop working. Heating can disappear, electric public transport can be disrupted and lifts can shut down.

There is also the increasingly important question of communication.

Yuliia’s parents are elderly, her father-in-law has a severe disability and her grandmother is bedridden. They live in different parts of Kharkiv, meaning that when the electricity goes down, keeping a mobile phone charged becomes a vital link between them.

“When our family received the power station, I immediately felt much less afraid,” she said.

“Now I can turn on a flashlight instead of lighting a candle, which can be dangerous. I can always charge my phone and stay in contact with my relatives.”

For her baby, it means Yuliia can heat water for a bath or hot-water bottle even when mains electricity has disappeared.

And it means she can keep her phone running to follow air-raid warnings and information about incoming Russian missiles and drones, knowing when she needs to take her child to shelter.

The scale of the destruction behind those blackouts is extraordinary. Before Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine had around 55 gigawatts of installed electricity generation capacity, although the International Energy Agency estimates around 44 GW was actually available. Years of occupation, missile and drone attacks and damage to power stations have stripped much of that away. By January 2026, Ukrainian authorities told UN monitors that available generation capacity had fallen to around 11 GW, against peak winter demand of around 18 GW.

Ukraine's Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said Russia carried out 612 attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure during 2025 alone, while around 8.5 GW of generation capacity had been knocked out since October 2025 as the bombardment intensified.

Then came the winter. UN human rights monitors said Russian forces carried out near-daily attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure during January, including five major coordinated assaults in which several regions were attacked simultaneously.

Energy facilities were damaged or destroyed across at least 17 regions and Kyiv, with millions of people left with electricity for only a few hours each day.

It happened during Ukraine's coldest winter since 2010. Temperatures fell below minus 20C as repeated strikes damaged not just electricity infrastructure but the centralised systems supplying heating and hot water to Ukrainian cities.

The UN found hundreds of thousands of civilians were left without heating and hot water for weeks. Power cuts stopped water reaching multi-storey buildings, disrupted healthcare and forced schools to close.

In Dnipropetrovsk region, the impact could be seen on an enormous scale. After Russian strikes in January, around 800,000 consumers were left without electricity while authorities scrambled to restore heat and water to more than one million people. Eight mines lost power and critical infrastructure was forced onto backup supplies.

Later that month, another major attack left around 1.2 million homes across Ukraine without electricity, including more than 800,000 households in Kyiv and roughly 400,000 in the Chernihiv region, according to Ukrainian officials.

UN investigators later documented at least 423 attacks on electricity generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure between October 2025 and March 2026, alongside at least 74 attacks on combined heat and power plants and other heating infrastructure.

The result was an energy system forced to operate with almost no margin for error.

By the summer, Ukraine still had little opportunity to recover. Ukrenergo warned in June that renewed Russian attacks combined with prolonged heatwaves could force emergency outages of up to five hours a day during July and August.

And the attacks have continued as another winter approaches. On September 17, Russian missile and drone strikes again damaged energy infrastructure during attacks across several Ukrainian regions.

Against that backdrop, a portable battery and solar panel can suddenly become far more important than their relatively simple technology might suggest.

For another Ukrainian family displaced from the Dnipropetrovsk region, electricity is directly linked to whether their children can attend school.

The family cares for foster children who have lost their parents and relies on phones, laptops and tablets for online education.

During prolonged blackouts last winter, the children were frequently unable to join lessons because there was simply no way of charging the devices they needed.

A power station now means they can continue studying even when the electricity network around them has failed.

Boyechko said the same technology is being used by other families to cook, keep communications running and power medical equipment.

“Families with kids are using these to continue their education by doing homework, plugging in their laptops to the unit,” he said.

“They are able to prepare hot meals. Elderly that need medical devices to run on electricity, they are able to plug in medical devices. And also all the connectivity devices can also be charged and used during the blackout.”

In the Ternopil region, a father named Volodya lives with his wife and three young children in a village where he has also remained to help elderly residents who stayed behind.

For his youngest son, the problem was much simpler but no less real: he was terrified of the dark.

During outages his parents would leave candles burning through the night so that if he woke up, he would not find himself in complete darkness.

Their solar power station has a built-in light.

“Blackouts are not as frightening for us anymore because we have light,” Volodya said.

His family's story is a small example of what happens when electricity can no longer be taken for granted.

A blackout is not simply the lights going off.

Given enough time, it can mean the water stops. The heating goes cold. The lift stops moving. Card terminals and communications fail. Food cannot easily be cooked or refrigerated. Children cannot get online for school and elderly or disabled people can find themselves effectively trapped inside high-rise buildings.

For Ukrainians, that cascade is no longer theoretical. They have been living through it.

Hope for Ukraine now plans to increase the number of solar kits it has distributed to more than 3,200 by the end of the year as families brace for what could be another extremely difficult winter.

“This has been a really transformational programme,” Boyechko said.

“By the end of this year, we are looking to distribute over 3,200 of them and prepare families in Ukraine for a very difficult winter ahead.”

For the families receiving them, the technology is relatively simple: a battery, a solar panel and somewhere to plug in a phone, laptop, cooking appliance or medical device.

But after years in which Russian attacks have demonstrated how quickly electricity, heating, water and communications can disappear together, a few hours of stored power can mean something much bigger.

It can mean a child can still go to school. A mother can heat water for her baby. An elderly relative can keep a medical device running. A family can receive an air-raid warning.

And when the grid goes dark again, they still have light.