America Is Now a Rogue Superpower, The Atlantic, March 30, 2026

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The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine both published articles of enormous import today. The former is a tour de force focussed on the war with Iran and the disintegration of the world order based primarily on the victory of liberal democracy in World War Two and subsequently the Cold War.

The war with Iran, writ large in the Middle East, is competely interrelated with the war in Ukraine. Russia, China, Iran, the forces of dictatorship and brutality, are interlinked. But instead of combatting them with the strategic and moral imperatives of liberal democracy upon which the world and other liberal democracies could count on, the US has abandoned or attacked on the basis of regressive self-defeating nationalism, chaotic strategy and turned its own principles on its head.

Everything is changing, as we pointed out in The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Twenty-Eight, long before direct US involvement in the war with Iran began, while the war in Ukraine had already gone on for more than three years, the AI transformation was plunging forward on all fronts, from the digital device to the battlefield with increasing concern expressed, and the scourge of hunger and disease was being imposed on the children and people of the world in an utterly disgraceful and suicidal act of throwing out eighty years of policy in helping the hundreds of millions most in need on the planet, replaced by a policy in effect of making them a burden to be disposed of.

Robert Kagans’ America Is Now a Rogue Superpower, dated today, ties the war in Iran to Ukraine and everything else, brilliantly.

Our own post, The End Of Civilization As We Knew it, Part Thirty Five, on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale aggression in invading Ukraine, including our video from Independence Square in Kyiv, makes essentially the same points. That was just a few weeks ago, four days before the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, the ensuing full-scale war and widening Middle East involvement since–and ongoing as we write.

The second article here, refered to above, also dated today and appearing in next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, How Russia Weaponized the Cold Ukrainian Winter: Inside one Kyiv neighborhood as it braved the harshest conditions since World War II, by C.J. Chivers, brings the full brutality of the new world disorder ripping through your heart and soul.

There is much more to fill in to describe all the issues and relationships involved. We’ve been doing it for many years and will do so further.

But for now, these two articles and our two posts and video are a full enough menu of the hell the world is in now.

We conclude with excerpts from one of the most famous poems ever written, The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats, which have constantly been applicable since written in 1919, but arguably never had such tragic resonance as now:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Here are the articles:

America Is Now a Rogue Superpower

Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation.By Robert Kagan

MARCH 30, 2026,

Whenever and however America’s war with Iran ends, it has both exposed and exacerbated the dangers of our new, fractured, multipolar reality—driving deeper wedges between the United States and former friends and allies; strengthening the hands of the expansionist great powers, Russia and China; accelerating global political and economic chaos; and leaving the United States weaker and more isolated than at any time since the 1930s. Even success against Iran will be hollow if it hastens the collapse of the alliance system that for eight decades has been the true source of America’s power, influence, and security.

For America’s friends and allies in Europe, the Iran war has been a significant strategic setback. As Russia and Ukraine wage a grinding war that will be “won” by whoever can hold on the longest, the Iran war has materially and psychologically helped Russia and hurt Ukraine. Even before Donald Trump lifted oil sanctions on Russia, oil prices were skyrocketing—and filling Vladimir Putin’s war chest with billions of dollars, just as Russia’s wartime deficits were starting to cause significant pain. The unexpected windfall gives Putin more time and capacity to continue destroying Ukraine’s economic infrastructure and energy grid. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states are burning through U.S.-provided stocks of air-defense interceptors, drawing on the same limited supply that Ukraine depends on to defend its largest cities from Russian missile strikes.

More worrying for European allies has been the evident indifference of the United States to the consequences of its actions. For Europeans, the existential threat today comes not from a weakened and impoverished Iran but from a nuclear-armed Russia that invaded Ukraine in the most brazen act of cross-border territorial aggression in Europe since World War II. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Europeans last year to be ready by 2027 to defend themselves without American help, and so they have been desperately reorienting their economies and military strategies to take on the Russian threat without the United States. They have also taken on the bulk of military and economic support for Ukraine because they fear, as many American analysts do, that Putin’s territorial ambitions are extensive, and other European states may be next. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil, over the opposition of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and the European Union, showed just how little regard the United States has for Europe’s security. The message to Europe, as the scholar Ivan Krastev has noted, is that “the trans-Atlantic relationship no longer matters.”

U.S. actions have been no less damaging to America’s friends and allies in East Asia and the Western Pacific. Japan gets 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and 70 percent of that passes through the now-blocked Strait of Hormuz. Yet Japanese and other Asian diplomats in the first weeks of the war complained that they were “not receiving any communication from the Trump administration.” At the same time, the United States has dispatched an aircraft-carrier battle group and other warships from the Western Pacific to the Persian Gulf, including elements of the Tripoli amphibious ready group, that would be needed for an American response to Chinese aggression, including an attack on Taiwan.

Trump’s supporters have tried to argue that the war with Iran will “boost deterrence” against Russia and China by demonstrating that “a direct confrontation with the U.S. would be extraordinarily damaging.” Given that the United States remains the world’s strongest nuclear-armed power, that is likely not a revelation to Moscow and Beijing. Yet nothing about Trump’s willingness to bomb Iran suggests that he’s any more prone than before to seek a “direct confrontation” with Russia. On the contrary, Trump has consistently sought to appease Putin by cutting off direct supplies of U.S. weaponry to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give in to Russian territorial demands, and now by lifting sanctions on Russian oil.

From the March 2026 issue: America vs. the world

As for China, combined Israeli and American forces have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their success is not necessarily replicable in the Pacific. Taking out an adversary’s sophisticated air defenses is a dangerous operation—one that Israel shouldered in Iran, making the subsequent U.S. assault possible. The U.S. had the capacity to take that first step but would not likely have assumed the risk. In the event of Chinese aggression against Taiwan, will the Israelis take out Chinese air-defense systems for the United States too?

Chinese leaders will also note that the United States has been fearful of sending warships to open the Strait of Hormuz lest they come under fire from a significantly depleted Iranian force. That’s understandable but not very intimidating. Hegseth has said that “the only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping.” No doubt, and the only thing preventing the United States from coming to the aid of Taiwan will be China shooting, with far superior and far more plentiful weaponry. Also not lost on the Chinese is the fact that the United States has had to pull significant air, naval, and ground forces from the Western Pacific, likely for months, in order to fight a decimated Iran.

Some analysts have suggested that Russia and China have failed to come to Iran’s defense, and that this somehow constitutes a defeat for them, because Iran was their ally. But the Russians are helping Iran by providing satellite imagery and advanced drone capabilities to strike more effectively at U.S. military and support installations. And China has not suffered a loss in Iran insofar as Iran has granted safe passage to its oil shipments.

More important, in Russia and China’s hierarchy of interests, defending Iran is of distinctly secondary importance; their primary goal is to expand their regional hegemony. For Putin, Ukraine is the big prize that will immeasurably strengthen Russia’s position vis-à-vis the rest of Europe. For China, the primary goal is to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, and anything that degrades America’s ability to project force in the region is a benefit. Indeed, the longer American attention and resources are tied up in the Middle East, the better for both Russia and China. Neither Moscow nor Beijing can be unhappy to see the war drive deep and perhaps permanent wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

The trump administration, however, has turned America’s long-standing hierarchy of interests upside down. For eight decades, Americans were deeply involved in the greater Middle East not because the region was intrinsically a vital national-security interest but as part of a broader global commitment to the alliances and freedom of navigation that undergirded the American-led liberal world order.

No state in the Middle East (including Iraq in 2003 and Iran today) ever posed a direct threat to the security of the American homeland. Iran has no missiles that can reach the United States and, according to American intelligence, would not until 2035. Access to Middle Eastern oil and gas has never been essential to the security of the American homeland. Today the United States is less dependent on Middle Eastern energy than in the past, which Trump has pointed out numerous times since the Strait of Hormuz was closed.

The United States has long sought to prevent Iraq or Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, but not because these countries would pose a direct threat to the United States. The American nuclear arsenal would have been more than adequate to deter a first strike by either of them, as it has been for decades against far more powerful adversaries. What American administrations have feared is that an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would be more difficult to contain in its region, because neither the United States nor Israel would be able to launch the kind of attack now under way. The Middle East’s security, not America’s, would be imperiled.

As for Israel, the United States committed to its defense out of a sense of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. This never had anything to do with American national-security interests. In fact, American officials from the beginning regarded support for Israel as contrary to U.S. interests. George C. Marshall opposed recognition in 1948, and Dean Acheson said that by recognizing Israel, the United States had succeeded Britain as “the most disliked power in the Middle East.” During the Cold War, even supporters of Israel acknowledged that as a simple matter of “power politics,” the United States had “every reason for wishing that Israel had never come into existence.” But as Harry Truman put it, the decision to support the state of Israel was made “not in the light of oil, but in the light of justice.”

Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.

America’s interests in the Middle East have always been indirect and secondary to larger global aims and strategies. During World War II, the United States led a coalition of nations that depended on the greater Middle East for oil and strategic position. During the Cold War, the United States assumed responsibility not only for the defense of the Jewish state but for the defense and economic well-being of European and Asian allies who depended on Middle Eastern oil. After the Cold War, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the George H. W. Bush administration believed that failing to reverse that aggression would set an ominous precedent in the aborning “new world order.”

That sense of global responsibility is precisely what the Trump administration came to office to repudiate and undo. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, which has dramatically shifted the focus of American policy from world order to homeland security and hemispheric hegemony, appropriately downgraded the Middle East in the hierarchy of American concerns. A United States concerned only with defense of its homeland and the Western Hemisphere would see nothing in the region worth fighting for. In the heyday of “America First” foreign policy during the 1920s and ’30s, when Americans did not regard even Europe and Asia as vital interests, the idea that they had any security interests in the greater Middle East would have struck them as hallucinatory.

Yet now, for reasons known only to the Trump administration, the Middle East has suddenly taken top priority; indeed, to supporters of Trump and the war, it seems to be the only priority, apparently worth any price, including the introduction of ground forces and even the destruction of the American alliance system.

This might make sense if there were no other threats to worry about. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, the greatest perceived menace was from international terrorism. China was in an accommodating phase, under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Russia posed no threat to Europe; rather, these were the years of Russo-German partnership, a time when Western Europeans found the overall strategic situation so unthreatening that they were the ones doubting the necessity of NATO. Only Eastern Europeans still worried about the return of a revanchist Russia, which is why they immediately joined the United States in the Iraq War.

Twenty-three years later, the situation is completely different. The greatest threats to world peace, and to the democracies of Europe and Asia, are not terrorism and Iran but two powerful and expansionist great powers, one of which has already invaded its neighbors and the other of which threatens to. Today’s world looks more like that of 1934 than like the supposedly post-historical paradise that some imagined after the Cold War. And European and American leaders are at odds not over philosophical disagreements about the utility of power but over fundamental security interests. American indifference to the European struggle against Russian aggression constitutes a profound geopolitical revolution—perhaps the final disintegration of the alliance relationships established after World War II.

One would be hard-pressed to find any nation in the world that has been reassured by the Israeli and American war against Iran, other than Israel itself. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gulf state leaders are “privately furious” with the U.S. for “triggering a war that put them in the crosshairs.” Despite its impressive power, the United States was unable to protect these countries from Iran’s attacks; now they have to hope that Trump will not leave them to face a weakened yet intact and angry Iranian regime but will instead double down on America’s long-term military commitment to the region, including by putting ground troops in Iran.

Israelis should also be asking how far they can count on the Americans’ dedication to this fight. A United States capable of abandoning long-standing allies in Europe and East Asia will be capable of abandoning Israel too. Can Israel sustain its new dominance in the region without a long and deep American commitment?

The unintended effect of the war, in fact, may be driving regional players to seek other great-power protectors in addition to the United States. Trump himself has invited the Chinese to help open the strait, and the Chinese are actively courting the Arab and Gulf states. The Gulf states are not averse to dealing with Beijing and Moscow. Neither is Israel. It sold management of a container terminal in the port of Haifa to a Chinese company, despite objections from the U.S. Navy, which uses the port.

Israel, practically alone among American allies, refused to take part in sanctions against Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2019, some of his campaign posters showed him shaking hands with Putin under the tagline a different league. No one should blame Israelis for this. They are an independent nation and can be expected to do what they feel they need to do to survive. Americans may have a sentimental or religious attachment to Israel, but Israelis cannot afford to be sentimental in return.

That is especially true given this administration’s cavalier attitude toward international responsibilities. The Iran war is global intervention “America First”–style: no public debate, no vote in Congress, no cooperation or, in many cases, even consultation with allies other than Israel, and, apparently, no concern for potential consequences to the region and the world. “They say if you break it, you own it. I don’t buy that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, arguably Trump’s most influential adviser on the war, said.

For Europeans, the problem is worse than American disregard and irresponsibility. They now face an unremittingly hostile United States—one that no longer treats its allies as allies or differentiates between allies and potential adversaries. The aggressive tariffs Washington imposed last year hit America’s erstwhile friends at least as hard as they hit Russia and China, and in some cases harder. Europeans must now wonder whether Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran makes it more or less likely that he will take similarly bold action on Greenland. The risks and costs of taking that undefended Danish territory, after all, would be far less than the risks and costs of waging the present war. Not some EU liberal but Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

This is the world we are now living in. Anti-Americanism is on the rise in formerly allied countries. Asked in a recent Politico poll whether Xi Jinping’s China or Trump’s United States was more dependable, 57 percent of Canadians, 40 percent of Germans, and 42 percent of Britons said China—a sharp decline in America’s perceived trustworthiness. In the past, America’s alliance relationships have survived waves of public disapproval because governments knew that whatever errors the United States made and however unpopular Washington might be, it remained fully committed to defending the order that protected them. Today that is no longer true.

Read: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over

Trump has repeatedly made clear, including during this war, that if he is unhappy with an ally, he will withdraw American protection. He temporarily cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine to punish it for refusing to bend to Moscow. He has warned that allies such as Japan and Korea should pay the United States for protection. During this war, he has threatened to leave the Strait of Hormuz closed and hand the problem off to those who need it more than the United States does. Trump’s tactics with allies consist almost entirely of threats: to tariff them, to abandon them, and, in the case of Greenland, to use force to seize their territory. When Trump discovered that he needed the help of allies against Iran, he did not ask them for help or work to persuade them. He simply “demanded” that they do what he said. Trump doesn’t want allies—he wants vassals.

As a result, friends and allies will be ever less willing to cooperate with the United States. This time, Spain refused American use of air and naval bases in its territory. Next time, that could be Germany, Italy, or even Japan. Nations around the world will come to rely not on American commitments and permanent alliances but on ad hoc coalitions to address crises. No one will cooperate with the United States by choice, only by coercion. Without allies, the United States will have to depend on clients that it controls, such as Venezuela, or weaker powers that it can bully.

For 80 years, the United States defied the closest thing there is to a law of physics in international relations: the concept of balancing. The seminal realist thinker Kenneth Waltz once observed that “unbalanced power, whoever wields it, is a potential danger to others.” This certainly should have applied to the United States, because the global distribution of power for eight decades after the end of World War II was highly “unbalanced” in America’s favor. Yet neither in the 1940s nor after the Cold War did the world’s other powers even consider banding together to balance against the American hegemon. Rather than regarding history’s first global “superpower” as a danger to be contained, they for the most part saw it as a partner to be enlisted.

Americans were not unerring stewards of world affairs. They could be selfish, self-righteous, paranoid, aggressive, and blundering, as well as indifferent and ignorant. They could be too confident about the scope of their power, and then too pessimistic about the possibilities of its use—in other words, Americans were not exceptional, even if their nation’s geopolitical circumstances were. Yet throughout the Cold War and for nearly four decades after it, allies and partners across the globe clung to the American order through thick and thin. It survived unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq. It survived made-in-America global economic calamities, such as the 2008 financial crisis. It even survived America’s relative economic and military decline. In fact, America’s great power was more than tolerated and forgiven: Other nations encouraged it, abetted it, and, with surprising frequency, legitimized it through multilateral institutions such as NATO and the United Nations, as well as in less formal coalitions. This, more than raw might, was what made the United States the most influential power in history.

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.View Discussion

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author, most recently, of Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again.

. . .

How Russia Weaponized the Cold Ukrainian Winter

By C.J. Chivers

C.J. Chivers worked in Kyiv, Ukraine, in January and February to report this article.

• March 30, 2026

Inside one Kyiv neighborhood as it braved the harshest conditions since World War II.

In Troieshchyna, a residential neighborhood at Kyiv’s northeastern edge, the slide into darkness and cold began during a single night early this year. For much of the war, Russia had been targeting the energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s capital. But after each strike, fires were doused, debris was cleaned up and power and heat were mostly restored. That changed overnight on Jan. 8, when explosions thundered across the city and the descent into sustained, frigid misery began.

Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass

The barrages that night resembled others preceding them. Russia’s military launched more than 240 long-range drones and three dozen cruise and ballistic missiles that flew in waves above the wintry countryside. But this attack would be consequentially different. As salvos screamed toward the capital, a circumstance invisible to the public had left the city exposed. Russia’s unrelenting campaign had depleted Ukrainian stocks of Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, its most effective air-defense weapons. Ukraine’s shield was down.

Shortly before midnight, the first missiles arrived. Kyiv’s heating and power plants absorbed devastating hits. Lights went out. More missiles followed hours behind. So began the most difficult run of winter weeks in Kyiv since the privations of World War II.

Now, almost three months on, Ukraine has just emerged from its coldest winter in close to 20 years, a difficult season that Russia weaponized with long-range strikes to make large parts of Kyiv barely inhabitable. During the harshest stretch of weather, in late January and early February, indoor temperatures plunged so low in Troieshchyna that residents’ breath sometimes frosted the air in their homes and the holy water in the district’s most prominent church froze in its basins. As the cold deepened, President Trump even asked his counterpart in the Kremlin, Vladimir V. Putin, to pause strikes against energy infrastructure for a week.

Cunning Russian tactics exploited Kyiv’s structural vulnerability. The dominant architecture in Troieshchyna is a common form of late-Soviet-era apartment building known as a panelka; in plural, panelky. Erected from prefabricated reinforced concrete panels welded together like enormous houses of cards, panelka after panelka line Troieshchyna’s streets, often looming 15 stories or more above traffic. Some are narrow vertical towers, others massive rectangular blocks. Together they stand in clusters or rows, along with a few arranged in huge circles around a central courtyard.

The Kremlin’s wars against former vassal states and Russia’s own citizens have shown for decades that concrete-paneled housing towers possess built-in strengths under bombardment. The buildings themselves are fire-resistant and sturdy; hollowed out and abandoned panelky from Grozny to Kupiansk have demonstrated the structural integrity to withstand, up to a point, direct hits from much of Russia’s conventional arsenal.

But they have a vulnerability, allowing them to be severed from modern utilities by the dozens, even hundreds. The weakness lies in urban-planning decisions from generations back. Panelky were a rapid and cost-contained solution to housing shortages as populations grew after World War II. Few of these buildings have boilers in their basements. Instead, Soviet authorities built centralized thermal plants, mammoth structures scattered throughout cityscapes, to supply hot running water and heat to residential neighborhoods — baseline conditions essential to contemporary urban life.

For a military force willing to set aside law, a neighborhood of panelky can be rendered almost uninhabitable more quickly, and at far lower expense, by hitting these energy plants rather than striking the buildings directly. Entire neighborhoods go dark, then turn cold; because panelky tend to be poorly insulated, the discomfort can swiftly turn dangerous.

The attacks of early January severed more than 400,000 households from electricity, city officials said, and left 6,000 buildings without heat. Problems compounded from there. Once buildings become cold enough, pipes freeze and residents lose running water. In this way, a measure of cruelty from long-range attacks can be distributed to an entire population in their homes without hitting the homes at all. Call it sanctuary denial on the cheap or, in the words of Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, a premeditated assault “on the life-support system of a modern city.”

International law prohibits deliberate attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, on the basis that the machinery distributing utility service to populations amounts to “civilian objects,” which are protected under the Geneva Conventions. On these grounds, in 2024 the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrests, for crimes against humanity, of four senior Russian military officers accused of involvement in energy-grid attacks up to that point. After the court issued these warrants, the attacks increased.

Ukrainians have a name for the experience that followed: the kholodomor. The term combines the Ukrainian words for “cold” and “plague” and echoes the older holodomor, the famine that killed millions of people in the early 1930s and resonates today as a defining national tragedy and sinister example of the lengths the Kremlin has gone against a neighboring people. The holodomorserved Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian designs — to assert control over the country’s black-earth farmland, force peasants onto state-run collective farms and break Ukrainian national identity and will. To Ukrainians, attacks on energy infrastructure represent a fresh round of Russian collective punishment against noncombatants, intended to create the requisite amount of economic damage and human suffering to force capitulation.

It has not worked. Many Ukrainians who survived this winter expressed sentiments similar to those of Svitlana, 66, a resident of a panelka in Troieshchyna who asked that her surname be withheld for her personal security. She in many ways fit a category of Ukrainian citizen that Putin claims as his own — her family hailed from Russia, she long preferred the Russian language over the Ukrainian and, after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, she did not trouble herself to learn her new national anthem. She saw herself as a Russian on adjacent land. Russia’s full invasion, and the deeper suffering she went on to endure, ended all that. “I’m ethnically Russian,” she said. “Russia forced me to be Ukrainian.”

During the attack on Jan. 8, Svitlana felt the explosions from her ground-floor apartment where she lives with her cat, Manyasha. Troieshchyna shook. Lights went out. Soon the temperature in her apartment fell, the start of punishing living conditions that would last until spring. For her, the kholodomor did more than drive her from the Kremlin’s grasp — it extinguished her remaining affinity to the culture of her past.

By late January, Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, announced that cellphone data indicated more than 600,000 people had evacuated from the city, roughly one-sixth of the capital’s prewar population of more than three million. The city’s military administration questioned the claim, but whatever the precise tally, signs of exodus abounded. As the freeze lengthened, many residents departed for villages or to live with relatives with heat — including in homes warmed by firewood, an old form of energy independence. Apartments stood empty. Chilled corridors fell more quiet.

The remaining people made do. Outside, life moved on, at a slower pace. Children sledded on a small slope behind Svitlana’s building. To the north, the memorably named Mafia restaurant served sushi, soups and pizza from a kitchen powered by a generator. A kiosk near the courtyard used another generator to heat coffee. The Epicentr hypermarket set up displays of jugs of potable water, small butane camp stoves and pressurized cans of fuel. To the south, the blue-domed Cathedral of the Holy Trinity held regular services in its basement, where temperatures were a notch warmer. Framed photographic portraits arranged in a memorial near the staircase to the basement honored at least 60 service members killed in action.

Insulated warming tents in Troieshchyna offered shelter to those who needed relief. To battle boredom and simply get out, on weekends people found escape in other ways, taking the club scene into the open-air chill by gathering on the frozen surface of Kyiv Reservoir, to the city’s north, to defy the notion that life had been fully dulled. Thumping beats reverberated on thick, snow-covered ice. Alternating D.J.s selected tracks, beat matching and mixing, while dancers drank shots, smoked from hookahs and warmed themselves around steel drums converted to makeshift stoves. Just offshore, other revelers spun high-speed doughnuts on the slick ice, kicking up rooster tails of finely powdered snow.

Svitlana did not travel to the reservoir. She remained in the apartment she had moved into during summer 1993, back when work crews were completing finishing touches on the structure. As more residents arrived years ago, she assumed the responsibilities of dvirnyk, or yard keeper, a position on the building’s staff that involved sweeping entryways, staircases and the exterior grounds. As an original resident and constant presence outside the 12 entrance doors, Svitlana filled a unique role, first as caretaker, then as keeper of the panelka’s history. She watched new neighbors make the housing block home, planting apricot, mulberry and cherry trees, along with grape vines, roses, hibiscuses, irises and tulips.

The early years of Ukrainian independence were not easy. But it was a time of peace. Now the building was roughly 300 miles from the active ground-combat line. And as the war’s effects permeated Ukrainian society, its residents weathered hardship with a mix of adaptation, resolve, resignation and sorrow. Grief hovered in the chilled corridors, too: Some of Svitlana’s neighbors joined Ukraine’s armed forces, departed for war and did not return, including Andriy, whom Svitlana knew decades ago as a boy with an affinity for animals. He became a veterinarian as an adult, then enlisted in 2022. Andriy served as infantryman until falling wounded, after which he trained as a drone pilot and returned to duty. In 2025, he was declared missing. Last fall, the government informed Andriy’s mother that he had been killed. Shock drove her into seclusion; Svitlana had not seen her in weeks.

Andriy was not the only loss from the building’s first generation of children. Another boy she knew well, who had become a carpenter, enlisted at about age 35. He was missing, too. At the last exchange of prisoners, Svitlana watched the television news, hoping to spot his face among the freed troops. He was not there. “I hope he is alive and in captivity,” she said.

Outside, the wind blew, sculpting the snow around the panelka into wavy drifts like the surface of a white sea. For as long as she could, Svitlana held firm. To be a dvirnyk was to be practical; she was good with her hands. To convert her unheated space into survivable housing, she bought a roll of foil insulation and wrapped it around her door and door jamb, neatly folding corners and forming a barrier against the temperatures in the corridor. She lined the floor with blankets and extra carpets, blocking the foot-numbing cold of concrete. She managed to keep her home in the 40s Fahrenheit, enough to prevent the jugs of water she lugged home from freezing. Thus fortified, she could wash hands, make tea and flush her toilet.

After the attack in early January, the power authorities opted not to ration electricity to the building, because it had no heat. This allowed Svitlana to charge her phone, have light, run a small space heater and cook on her electric stove. But without running water, cooking remained a chore, as did cleaning up after. Some days, overwhelmed with stress, she did not eat at all. Bundled in clothing suited for ski slopes, often topped with a blue floral robe, she pursued a patriotic avocation — knitting two pairs of wool socks a day to send to soldiers at the front.

Resignation showed. A short walk separated her apartment from the nearest bomb shelter. At a brisk pace — starting from the entrance and ending at the supermarket a little more than 300 yards away — Svitlana could cover the distance with time to spare when air-raid sirens wailed. She no longer bothered. It was not that she was naïve. She’d felt the impact of a kamikaze drone that struck almost next door in fall, and another down the road. But attacks were too frequent, and lasted too long, for her to hustle into the cold, night upon night. She would hear air-raid sirens, listen for incoming weapons and wait in bed.

“I just lay down,” she said. “If it hits, it hits.”

On Jan. 29, Trump announced that, at his request, Putin had agreed to a weeklong cessation of Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities. Citing the “extraordinary cold,” he called Putin’s favorable reply a “considerate gesture.” The timing allowed for cautious hope. The Ukrainian word for February is lyutyi, which means “fierce,” a nod to winter’s peak fury. The new month lived up to reputation. Temperatures plummeted below zero Fahrenheit.

For a few nights, Kyiv did not face attack. But on Feb. 2, the fifth day of the supposed pause, the cessation was revealed as a sham. Roughly 450 drones and missiles flew toward targets. Five struck the Darnytsia Combined Heat and Power Plant, which had ceased generating electricity in January but still provided heat. The missiles knocked out that capacity, too. To Ukrainians, it looked as if Trump had been played. Intervals between major missile attacks often lasted days. The timing suggested that Russia went along with the language of peace while queuing up the next strikes in tempo with the war’s usual pace.

The next morning, a truckload of uniformed laborers arrived in the parking lot behind Svitlana’s building to try repairing heating pipes that had been frozen for weeks. Led by Andriy Udovyka, 31, the foreman of a maintenance crew that repaired railway lines in eastern Ukraine, they assembled on the sidewalk, smoking and readying equipment, while residents gathered in gratitude.

Udovyka’s suffering in the first year of the full invasion had taken a vicious form. He had served in Ukraine’s National Guard in 2018 and 2019, and his right shoulder bore a tattoo of the emblem of his former base. Seized in August 2022 by Russian troops who occupied his home city, he was turned over by his captors to former Ukrainian police officers collaborating with the occupiers, then held and tortured with scores of other local men in a district police department headquarters. Before he was freed in a Ukrainian counteroffensive, a jailer burned off his tattoo with a gas torch, taunting him as he did. A wrinkled white scar shows where it had been. After he recovered, he returned to work. Over the winter, the railroad temporarily assigned him to Kyiv, where he led a team of welders and crane operators, many displaced from former homes, trying to restore heating.

The crew descended to the basement with propane torches and welding equipment and commenced thawing frozen plumbing and replacing cracked pipes. After two days, they reconnected part of its heating system to the city’s remaining thermal-plant output. Hot water began flowing, bringing a modest temperature boost inside. “These men have golden hands,” Udovyka said. Many more addresses were in need of repair. The crew packed and left.

The good news was not what it seemed: The particulars of Svitlana’s apartment assured that she received no heat. Her unit, she said, was last on a loop of plumbing that carried hot water from the basement to the 15th floor, warming apartments as it rose, before descending to the basement and flowing back into what remained of the damaged municipal distribution system. By the time water reached her radiator on the ground floor, it had cooled. Adding to her troubles, because Udovyka reported the panelka as repaired, the power authorities began rationing its electricity, leaving residents with only a few hours of power a day. With no way to warm water for hours on end, Svitlana relied on camping heat tabs to make tea. The smoldering tabs left an acrid smell. At night, inside, the building returned to black. Her space heater no longer ran.

At last her son persuaded her to give in. On Feb. 5, he evacuated her to his apartment. One more unit stood empty.

Others had no such option, including Iryna Zlobina, 55, from the small eastern Ukrainian city of Popasna. Russian forces overran Popasna in 2022, shelling as they advanced and killing her brother, Pavlo, during a barrage. Already displaced, she lived in a third-floor unit and had no relatives to take her in or other home to which she might return. “My city doesn’t exist anymore,” she said, wearing a heavy coat indoors.

Her breath fogged the cold air beside the bed on which she huddled at night, alone, freighted with loss. When a roughly 400-pound kamikaze drone struck two buildings away in the fall, she said, her bed seemed to jump in the air. “Luckily the windows were not broken,” she said. Glass was all that separated her from the Arctic cold mass outside. She had no choice but to shelter in place and hope circumstances did not turn worse. “I’m very depressed because of all of this,” she said. “People say, ‘You should enjoy life because you are still alive.’” She shook her head. “I’m not sure I want to stay alive.”

To her, the modest success of the work crew was grounds for frustration and dread. As a former employee of a central heating plant, she knew her building was now on a lower-priority list for electricity, which she saw as unjust. “The heating does not work,” she said. “Just because you have heat on paper, it doesn’t mean that it’s here.”

Outraged at the electrical cuts, Iryna organized residents to sign a petition protesting the electricity rationing and succeeded in having a second work crew assigned to the panelka. But for most buildings, timely technical relief would not be coming — the damage to many central heating and electrical plants was all but irreparable. Kharchenko, of the Energy Industry Research Center, said restoring full electrical and heating capacity would not require weeks, or even months. “It will be years,” he said. “In the best-case scenario, we will be able to restore maybe 30 or 40 percent of electrical capacity before next winter.” Ukraine, he said, was in “survival mode: Restore what you can restore and start building what you can in time.” Getting back to full capacity, he added, will require as much as five years, as entire power plants would have to be erected and fortified. “It’s not possible to build something serious faster,” he said.

In the interim, he suggested, residents of many buildings would have to reduce their post-Soviet dependence on centralized heating plants and invest in a degree of energy independence: pooling funds for solar panels and buying generators or free-standing boilers. Such steps would reduce the power and impact of Russia’s long-range attacks, should the war continue into next year.

Chill gripped Kyiv through most of February. But days lengthened. Snow turned slushy. The frigid Arctic air mass began to yield. The Ukrainian word for March is berezen, derived from the word for birch tree, a reference to the spring and its implicit hope.

Five stories above the courtyard Svitlana once swept, Olena Vorobiova and her family kept faithful to demanding routines. Olena lived in the apartment with her daughter, Vladyslava, 13, and her second husband, Vadym Yudytskyi, who worked in a brewery. Beyond the grit and resolve required to endure their circumstances, they possessed something more — a kernel of Ukraine’s ambitions of leaving behind the early post-Soviet era for a Western European way of life.

Employed by a bank, Olena had responsibilities to fulfill. She also faced a particular challenge — creating a sense of stability for a teenager. “For a child to feel confident and safe,” she said, “the parents should be emotionally balanced.”

Stability was a choice requiring action. Anticipating a difficult winter, Olena bought a power bank last fall, set up a butane camp stove in the kitchen and signed up herself and her daughter for membership at a heated swimming pool, which they visited each weekend. After the building’s interior temperatures sank in January, she retreated from her bedroom, which was against an exterior wall, and moved with Vladyslava into the entryway. There they slept together on nights when Vadym worked; Shusha, their cat, and Ivi, their English spaniel, curled alongside.

Vladyslava had lived the war’s tensions firsthand. She was 9 when Russia’s mechanized brigades rolled over borders. Expecting an assault on Kyiv, she and her brother moved in with relatives in a village. It was a miscalculation: Russian soldiers seized the village. The pair spent weeks under occupation, remaining indoors until Ukraine’s soldiers drove the invaders back. Last year, her father enlisted in the army. He served in air defense, trying to shoot down the same weapons attacking his city.

Now in eighth grade in Kyiv and a perfect English speaker, Vladyslava followed Olena’s lead. Activity was agency and power. She kept to her schoolwork, studying English, German and mathematics. She was focused on the dream she formulated with her parents: to attend university in England and work in a Western bank.

As Kyiv shuddered in the cold, her insistence on maintaining the semblance of normality took shape. She participated in contemporary dance at One Room, a private studio, three nights a week. “Dance is not just physical activity,” said Kristina Shevchenko, the studio owner and lead choreographer, as Vladyslava and other students rehearsed one evening. “It’s also an opportunity to develop and to realize what is your soul.” The regimen nurtured a sense that ordinary life and hardship could coexist, and the former would prevail.

“Normal life,” she said, “is hope.”

By the numbers — the volume of drone and missile attacks, the count of power plants hit, the tally of nights without light or weeks without heat — Russia’s energy war could be read as indicators of the Kremlin’s martial success. They could also be read as signs of its weakness. As spring arrived and the war entered its fifth year, the strikes had required a retooling of Russia’s military-industrial complex, cost vast sums of money and landed four of its senior military leaders on wanted-for-war-crimes lists without achieving its principal intended effect. Ukraine had not yielded. It fought on, continuing to block Russia’s far larger army while littering the front with the invaders’ bodies. A targeted people had hardened in resentment and disgust.

Vladyslava kept true to her Western dream. Others reappraised their Soviet pasts. Just down the street from Svitlana’s panelka, Zoya Perevozchenko, 76, sat in the chilly dimness of her kitchen, recounting a strike on her building during the opening rounds of cold-season attacks last fall. A tall narrow panelka beside the highway, her building held a special connection to both Ukrainian and Soviet history. Among its residents were surviving families of “liquidators” — the first responders and cleanup crews who contained the radioactive waste after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 — including Zoya, whose husband, Valeriy, succumbed to radiation poisoning 48 days after the blasts at Reactor No. 4.

The Soviet Union honored Valeriy at a special section of Mitinskoe Cemetery in Moscow. In recognition of Zoya’s suffering and loss, the authorities awarded her an apartment in the newly erected panelka in Troieshchyna, which was expanding into the farmland of Kyiv’s left bank. Other surviving families from the disaster resettled in the same tower, including Natalia Khodemchuk, widow of Valeriy Khodemchuk, an engineer who worked under Zoya’s husband and was Chernobyl’s first fatality. He too was honored at the same cemetery as his boss, though his body, lost within the rubble, was never found. Joined in grief and horror, determined to live and bestowed with official Kremlin recognition, Zoya and Natalia became close, enduring friends.

Five years after the nuclear accident, the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian officials continued to venerate Natalia and Zoya and hosted them at annual memorial services in Moscow. Relations remained warm until they turned cold. Honors dwindled after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and organized a separatist war in eastern Ukraine. Civilian travel between the two countries declined. After the full invasion of 2022, back-and-forth travel all but ceased. Natalia was Ukrainian. She chose her people’s side. In the apartment the Soviet authorities had given her, she passed time knitting wool belts for Ukrainian troops to wear under body armor as they fought Russian soldiers, sent by the same Kremlin that once heralded her family’s sacrifice, before shunning her because of her ethnicity and address. Zoya, whose youngest grandson volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian armed forces upon turning 18, sometimes joined her.

The final outrage arrived in mid-November, in the form of a Shahed drone, or Geran-2, as the Russian knockoffs of the original Iranian design are also known. Russia has launched more than 57,000 Shaheds at Ukrainian targets. To reach Kyiv, some drones carry multiple SIM cards and fly along Ukraine’s border with Belarus, apparently while transmitting data to Russian military units on local cellphone networks, said Oleksandr, a government expert who examines and analyzes Russian weapons. (He asked for his surname to be withheld for security reasons.) When drones flying along the border draw near to their targets in Ukraine, he said, they turn south. Such routes can then pass over Troieshchyna. Moreover, Shaheds in the recent cold season often flew at remarkably low altitudes through Ukrainian airspace, sometimes below the height of housing towers. Intended to evade detection by radar, the tactic can endanger civilians in panelky.

The night that their panelka was hit, Zoya was in her apartment, listening to the weapons’ distinctive buzzing sound as they passed overhead. Natalia was on a couch in her seventh-floor apartment’s corridor when a Shaded crashed through her window.

Shaheds often carry warheads spiked with incendiary compounds; fire burned Natalia in the first flash. She rushed to the kitchen to douse herself at the sink, only to find, when she turned toward the apartment door, that a rising blaze blocked her path. Like her husband almost 40 years ago, she was trapped. She did not give up. She plunged into the flame, reached her door and forced herself into the corridor, then staggered down four flights of stairs to Zoya’s door, screaming for help. Burns covered more than 40 percent of her body. An ambulance hurried her to care. She died the next day.

After the strike, the blackened apartment, full of Natalia’s charred possessions, was open to the air. The tower still stood. Many residents remained, only to lose heat and electricity in January. In February, three men trudged up the tower’s staircase, planning to thaw a juncture of heating pipes in a service room on the top floor. Electricity was out. The stairway was lightless. They reached the top floor but had no key and could not pass the last door. The man leading them opted instead to go to the electrical utility office to demand power. It was a short walk away, over snow so cold it squeaked and crunched underfoot. The utility office had no electricity either. The receptionist sat at her desk in a parka, running the operation on a cellphone.

A cold night followed, without light. The next morning, Zoya recalled Natalia’s arrival at her door, burned like her husband before her. Together the two women had survived one of the Soviet Union’s most spectacular failures to become celebrated in Moscow as living examples of citizens whose families gave all. Now the full circle of their relationship to the Kremlin closed in darkness, cold and long-distance betrayal. If weaponizing winter had meant to bring Ukraine at last to compliance and heel, in the panelky of Troieshchyna, it failed.

“The only feeling I have toward them,” Zoya said of the Russians who formerly offered official embrace, “is hate.”

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Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting.

Finbarr O’Reilly is a visual journalist and author who has been working in conflict zones and complex humanitarian emergencies over the last 20 years.

Read by Robert Fass

Narration produced by Tanya Pérez

Engineered by Alec K. Redfearn

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin