What is the limit of Ukrainian civilians’ endurance? In nearly four years of relentless war, Ukraine’s people have faced summary executions, ‘drone safaris’ where unmanned aerial vehicles hunt people down city streets and constant bombardment of cities by swarms of drones and missiles. This winter their remarkable resilience faces its severest test yet as Russian forces reach a tipping point in their systematic attempt to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure.

In each of the past three winters, Vladimir Putin has attempted to render Ukraine’s cities uninhabitable by plunging them into darkness and cold, without success. But this time it looks like the Kremlin’s campaign to weaponise winter may be succeeding. With temperatures in Ukraine falling to -16°C, Russian forces are trying to knock out as many citywide heating systems as possible. Over the past week, Russia hit Ukraine with an unheard-of bombardment of nearly 1,100 drones, 890 guided bombs and more than 50 missiles, including the Oreshnik hypersonic missile, targeting power plants and homes during brutal cold. Volodymyr Zelensky called the attacks ‘cynical terror’ aimed at civilian suffering, with more than 1,000 buildings losing heat. Since Christmas, Russian attacks have blacked out the cities of Odesa, Sumy, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zhitomir and Zaporizhia for more than a day, along with swaths of Kyiv and its suburbs.

The reason Putin’s latest attacks are particularly effective is a basic but inexorable law of physics – water expands by about 10 per cent when it freezes, cracking pipes and heating systems that cannot........

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