When Alina Trebushnikova woke up on Thursday morning, the light was on and she knew the day had already got off to a bad start.
The electricity in her neighbourhood of Novomoskovsk had returned in the middle of the night and that meant it would not be on for much longer. As a result, the little house would be colder and darker for much of the day.
It gets dark by 4pm in Ukraine now and temperatures hover just below zero after nightfall. Next week a deep frost is expected and the days will grow even shorter, as Ukrainians approach their hardest winter since the second world war.
Alina’s husband, Oleksii, was away at his construction job and would only return long after dark. Their two boys, nine-year-old Ilia and Yakov, three years younger, were at the home of Alina’s parents, who have a wood stove, independent of the vagaries of the grid.
Alina is 31 and has lived in Novomoskovsk since she was seven, when her parents moved out of a block of flats in nearby Dnipro to live closer to the earth, as they put it. She now spends most of her days alone with Polina, born three months ago, while making food for the family, juggling with limited light, heat and ingredients.
There is gas to cook with and Alina usually makes dinner in the middle of the day, when there is enough light to see what she is doing. After sunset they have only a small string of decorative lights that her husband rigged up with a battery.
On Thursday, Alina was preparing borscht and rice and a bit of meat. How long this was going to go on for, she could not say, but it sounded to her like the war would not end soon. Meanwhile, they must endure.
“They say a Ukrainian woman can stop a horse in its tracks,” she said with a smile. “She must be a mountain for her husband and children.”
Before the most recent Russian missile strikes last week, there was at least some predictability about electricity. It would come on for four hours and then off for four. But since Vladimir Putin’s latest missile salvo hammered down on Ukraine’s power grid on 23 November, there has been less electricity, lasting three or four hours, and it comes at random times. On some mornings, Alina has woken up to find it had come and gone in the night.
The part of Novomoskovsk where the Trebushnikovas live used to be a village. It is a grid of single-storey cottages with walls or fences enclosing small gardens, and deeply rutted dirt lanes between them. It has long been on the receiving end of Russian imperial ambitions. The town’s name, meaning New Moscow, was imposed in 1794 by Catherine the Great, whose dismemberment of neighbouring states to the greater glory of Russia is an inspiration for Putin.
“I don’t understand why this is happening,” Alina said. “I am against Putin, but I am not against Russians. I have a lot of relatives in Russia – my father was from Russia –and they say they support me.”
The heating system is gas-powered and the family has gas, but it takes electricity to pump the hot water through the pipes, and when the power fails, the pipes begin to cool. In an effort to conserve as much heat as possible, the Trebushnikovas have covered all the windows with blankets, but that only makes it darker.
The neighbours have a generator, but it cost about 50,000 hryvnias (£1,110), too much for a family living on one income, especially when you add the cost of petrol.
The town was without power for a full 24 hours after the 23 November onslaught and Alina, Ilia and Polina got sick. Polina had a chest infection over the weekend that grew severe in the middle of the night but the ambulance would not come. Take the baby to hospital yourself, they told Alina, but that would have meant breaking the curfew. They had no choice but to stay at home, and after a nervous night, Polina recovered.
In the middle of Thursday afternoon, Ilia and Yakov came back from Alina’s parents, along with her 14-year-old brother, Oleksii. “I call him when it gets dark and there are no lights, and it is scary,” she said. “He is my protector.”
There has been no school for months. In theory, there are online classes, but that is only relevant if you have a computer or smartphone, which the Trebushnikova boys do not. In any case, the schools no longer have any power either. Oleksii goes into class to pick up homework assignments and tries to work on them with the help of textbooks and his parents. There is no teaching.
“Even if the school was open, I would be too scared to let the boys go,” Alina said. The last time a missile landed close to them, all the windows shook and the boys were terrified.
“The school has no cellar or shelter,” she explained. “When the air raid siren went off, I wouldn’t know what was happening to them.”
Oleksii is tall and thin, and mature for 14. He said he misses having friends to talk to at school, and he passes the time walking Knopa, the little black and white family dog. Ilia also misses having classmates. He plays cards with Yakov, and they celebrated loudly when the power finally came on on Thursday evening.
In the hierarchy of Ukrainian suffering, Alina was not sure where this episode belongs, but she suggested going to see Olha Chorna, an elderly neighbour a few blocks away, who lived through the second world war. Oleksii led the way and banged on Olha’s fence, and after a while the 82-year-old emerged and walked to the gate.
She was five when the war ended. Her father never returned and her mother died soon after that. She and her three sisters were left to fend for themselves. There were few clothes and little food available, but eventually other men came back from the front to work on a collective farm, which took in the girls. Olha’s job for many years was to milk the cows.
When Olha was a teenager, an old woman down the street claimed the gift of prophecy. “She said in the future there will be another war when brother is going to go against brother,” she recalled. “There was going to be famine and other terrible things.”
Maybe the prophecy has finally come true, because in her decades since 1945, Olha said, “this is going to be the toughest winter”.
