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Hello and welcome to Newsare. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.

I'm Tim Franks. We're beginning with what might seem like familiar territory, the war in Ukraine, in all its relentlessness, with news of another devastating Russian barrage overnight.

But for all that that might seem familiar, there's been a jarring split-screen sense to today.

Pictures on TV agency feeds of a smiling Vladimir Putin wishing his

Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, a happy Chinese New Year, the promise out of the gilded environs

of Abu Dhabi of a second round of peace talks between the antagonists brokered by the US. And, in contrast,

the increasingly bitter reality inside Ukraine

of vast numbers of people shivering as another huge bombardment of Russian ballistic missiles

and drones has hit energy supplies.

In the midst of one of Ukraine's harshest winters in years, people in Kiev and across the country

are trying to get by without heat, without electricity, in some cases, without water.

Irina Volks, whose husband is away fighting, lives with her daughter in the capital.

Now we have a very big problem with electricity. We don't have heating in our homes.

Room temperature is about six or ten degrees. I use warm bottles of water to sleep. I live with my daughter.

She is okay in general, like children. She tries to smile, yes, to live normal life,

but it's not normal life. She cannot study normal. She cannot use online lessons. And now I'm

thinking that maybe in some days later, I must go to the village to my parents, because here in Kiev, living is very awful.

Oleg Savitsky is another resident of Kiev. How tough are things at the moment?

This week, we have temperatures falling below 20 degrees Celsius, and the whole city is freezing, and especially

the left bank of Nipro River, where a lot of buildings, they are just with no heating, because

Russians destroyed our combined heat and power plants.

...