Christmas in Ukraine approaches with power grid in crisis

“It’s much worse than last year," said Mazur, 23. “We’re not in any mood to celebrate. We don’t know what Christmas and New Year will look like—whether we’ll be able to cook a meal."

In the fourth winter of full-scale war, Ukraine is dealing with its most severe energy crisis since 2022.

Ukrainians long ago grew accustomed to scheduled blackouts, designed to conserve energy, that last hours at a time.

But this year, Moscow has attacked Ukraine’s energy grid on a scale unseen in past years. Whereas last winter, a major Russian attack might have involved 100 drones and missiles, now it can send 500. In addition, the long-range Shahed-style drones Moscow uses are now far more advanced—flying faster and higher, making them far more difficult for air-defense teams to shoot down. In November alone, Russia launched more than 5,000 missiles and long-range drones into Ukraine, with many targeting energy infrastructure, according to Ukrainian officials.

Some parts of the country have been left in total darkness for days.

“Ukrainians face an unprecedented energy crisis. Imagine what a power station looks like after being hit by five ballistic missiles, and that’s in just one Russian attack," said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company. “I fear this will be the hardest winter since the invasion."

Four years of missile and drone strikes have significantly diminished Ukraine’s power generation.

Russia has taken control of one of the country’s nuclear power plants and several coal plants. Many of Ukraine’s hydroelectric and thermal plants have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Ministry of Energy. Ukrainian officials declined to provide exact statistics about the country’s generation capacity, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this month that there wasn’t a single plant in the country that hadn’t been damaged in Russian attacks.

Energy companies have stockpiled spare parts to make repairs. Still, supplies of some parts are limited and are quickly being used up.

“We lost nearly 2.5 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants, which isn’t possible to restore on a fast track," said Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center, a Kyiv think tank. “It will be quite a few months. Not everything can be maintained."

In Kyiv, blackouts now routinely stretch beyond 12 hours a day in some areas. Closer to the front line, 12 hours of electricity feels like a luxury.

But nowhere has been hit harder so far this winter than Odesa.

At the port, cargo is spoiling because without electricity some containers can’t be unloaded from ships, according to a logistics worker there. Meanwhile, thousands of residents, such as Nataliia Bakhtar, lost power completely for four days earlier this month.

As in many buildings, the water in Bakhtar’s apartment doesn’t work when the power is out, making cooking, showering or laundry impossible. Her complex has a power generator in the basement, where her family charges phones and other devices during outages.

“We go for walks around the city, because there’s no point sitting home in the dark," said Bakhtar, a 45-year-old who recently moved to Odesa from Russian-occupied Mariupol, adding that she stocked up on candles and flashlights for the holidays.

She believes the Russians are targeting civilian energy systems to break Ukrainians’ spirits. However, she said there was no comparison between life without electricity and life under Russian occupation. Her husband, a civilian, was detained for the first 3½ years of the war. He was returned to Ukraine as part of a prisoner exchange earlier this year, and Bakhtar and her 17-year-old daughter moved to Odesa to reunite the family.

She said the blackouts wouldn’t affect her attitude about making concessions to end the war.

“Life under occupation was also very hard," she said, adding that there were often issues with water and electricity in occupied Mariupol. “Better to be together, in Ukraine, without electricity, than to live through what we went through before."

Mykola Kolisnyk, a deputy energy minister, said Russia had begun using a new strategy in recent weeks. In addition to targeting substations on the national network, it has started hitting facilities from local energy companies in specific regions—especially those near the front line—hoping to sow discord.

“They can’t black out the whole country," Kolisnyk said. “So they’re trying to create instability in the local area." He added that single facilities were sometimes targeted by 50 drones and missiles in a single night.

Kharchenko said Odesa is one of the most vulnerable areas in Ukraine because very little energy was produced there, leaving it reliant on importing power.

In an effort to cut Odesa off from the national power grid, Kharchenko said, Russia was targeting not only voltage substations, as in years past, but also distribution substations. While many voltage substations are well protected, he said, there are roughly 3,500 distribution substations across Ukraine, making it nearly impossible to protect them all.

“When a big attack happens, in that region, the next four to five days will be very complicated," Kharchenko said. “But they can’t succeed on a national scale."

Oleh Karin, a 45-year-old construction worker in Odesa, has spent much of the past few weeks hiking up to his ninth-floor apartment on foot, often hauling bottles of water he fills at a nearby pump—when the power goes out, neither the elevator nor the water in his apartment works. The youngest of his three sons—11-year-old Nazar—often passes the time during the blackouts building tanks, planes and other military equipment out of Legos.

“The children understand—they know exactly who is responsible," Karin said, beginning to cry. “I can’t fully protect them."

But he said the Russian effort to get Ukrainians to capitulate by knocking out the energy wouldn’t work: “When there’s no electricity, we spend more time together. It’s Christmas season. The tree is already decorated. We sit together, playing board games or cards. In its own way, it’s even romantic."

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com