There was scant attempt to sugarcoat the assessment. With the trams stilled, lights going down across the city and the mobile network intermittent, arguably there was little point in doing otherwise.
“We have to brace ourselves for hard times,” said Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, as he addressed local and international journalists in a building off the western Ukrainian city’s cobbled Rynok Square.
Winter was coming and with it “perhaps the worst-ever period for our country”, the mayor said.
For all that the missiles would continue to rain down it was the cold that the Russians believed could break the Ukrainian spirit. Stock up on fire wood, buy in heaters, insulate where you can, Sadovyi counselled. It was time for Ukrainians to resort to the “old-time methods”.
“We are in for hard weeks and months ahead. Four [electricity] substations in the region have been put out of operation and to bring them back into operation they need transformers that are not available. It is hard right now to predict what will happen tomorrow. We will do all we can to keep the medical facilities operating.”
Lviv, just 50 miles from the Polish border, has at times felt somewhat removed from Vladimir Putin’s war.
Direct attacks have been few and far between. Following the initial shock over the launch of the Russian president’s “special military operation”, the bars and restaurants had swiftly rediscovered the liveliness that one would expect of an old university town.
When air raid sirens would go off to warn that Russian missiles had been launched, destination unknown, the danger could be barely acknowledged at times. Spring gave way to a relatively care-free summer.
The attacks of Monday and Tuesday changed all that.
15 missiles rained down on electricity substations in the Lviv region on Monday as part of a country-wide assault on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure that killed 20 people.
Repairs were swiftly made here and the electricity and water supply restored to much of the city by Monday evening.
Then Tuesday morning came, and dozens more were fired into the city from aircraft and ships on the Black Sea.
Some were blown out of the sky by the Ukrainian air-to-ground defences but three solidly hit their target, wiping out two electricity substations in the suburbs, injuring one worker but posing a far more serious threat to the health of the wider city.
“Nothing remains of them to be entirely honest with you,” said Maksym Kozytskyy, head of the Lviv region’s military administration, of the two stations most badly hit. “I am asking people to save energy as much as you can. The lines we had repaired [on Monday] have been broken again today and 30% of the Lviv region is off the grid.”
The schools have been shut but officials are keen for retail to keep going. “Yesterday a lot of shops had to close down because they were off the grid,” Sadovyi said.
“But some kept their doors open because they had diesel generators and they wanted to prevent panic. I ask shopkeepers to do everything they can to keep the shops open.”
The mayor suggested that the attacks of the last 48 hours may even serve a purpose by snapping Lviv out if its complacency. “It is war – we have to be clear the enemy want to kill,” he said. “The last two days have taught us a good lesson, a sense of reality.”
The city’s residents have been put on notice that there is but a fortnight to get ready as the nights draw in and temperatures drop.
Yuri Blahin, 34, walking alongside his wife Vladislava, 33, on Rynok Square with five-year-old Diana on his shoulders, said he had bought a diesel generator but feared for keeping his young family warm.
Artem Levchenko, 26, said he wanted to get out of the country back to Poland where he had been studying before the war, but could not get a visa.
The draughty state of the region’s 6,000 bomb shelters has been raised as a particular concern.
“I urge residents that all shelters should be equipped with a heater and fire wood,” Sadovyi said.
“It will save us from freezing. Any repairs [to the electricity grid] will need a day or two or three and we need to survive in the meantime. We need to survive the weapon of the enemy: which is cold, fear and destruction.”
