One of Russia's most potent weapons in Ukraine isn't a missile or a drone or some battlefield technology.

It's the cold. Just ask Ilia let it chinko.

When I wake up it was so cold and I go to work. And it's cold too.

NPR caught up with him last week after Russian attacks on infrastructure took out electricity, heat and water for large parts of Ukraine.

He wore his coat to bed after his apartment building in a suburb of key lost power.

At the restaurant where he worked he pulled out the gas cooker and his co-workers set candles on customer tables.

By gas cooker and candle give us a lighter. Very romantic.

He mustered a sense of humor to try and face the biting temperatures.

But the Russian attacks on energy infrastructure are deadly serious.

But simply this winter will be about survival.

That's Hans Kluga, regional director for Europe at the World Health Organization, on a visit to Ukraine this month.

The winter will be a threat for millions and millions of Ukraine people. I have seen it.

In fact now the temperature is hovering around zero degrees Celsius but soon it will plummet down to minus 20.

That's well under zero degrees Fahrenheit. He warned of the direct risks from cold, frostbite, hypothermia, stroke, heart attack and also knock on effects from the power outages.

How can hospital function without electricity, how can maternity works function without incubators, vaccine storage, without fridges?

For the last few months Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukrainian energy and infrastructure.

Russia claims that infrastructure constitutes military targets.

Ukraine and its allies say that the attacks are meant to punish Ukrainian civilians and break the people's will to fight.

Here's Ukrainian energy minister Garemon Galischenko talking to NPR in September.

It looks like that is a strategy. But that is of course not something similar to the war action. That's more close to the territory.

The country continues to grapple with power outages. Ukraine's power operator said this week that producers were steadily restoring power and remediating about 80% of the country's needs.

But rolling blackouts are still an effect to ration energy and more attacks are surely coming.

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