Kyiv's third night in the dark, Moscow's airports shut: the war is targeting everyday life

In some parts of Kyiv households get electricity for an hour, then it is dark again. This is now the third night in a row. Footage from the Ukrainian capital shows dark streets and junctions where only the traffic lights are on. On the night of 8 to 9 October Russian forces carried out a combined attack with cruise and ballistic missiles and "Geran" drones on several regions of Ukraine - and the new outages came before the damage from the previous strikes had been repaired.

Attacks were reported in Ivano-Frankivsk and the surrounding area, as well as in the Dnipropetrovsk, Rivne, Ternopil, Vinnytsia, Kyiv, Poltava, Volyn, Zhytomyr and Odesa regions. In Chernihiv, according to local sources, powerful explosions rang out after two drones struck. The attack on Kharkiv's CHP-5 thermal power plant stands out, as it had only recently come back online: according to local channels, it was hit with aerial bombs. Some sources claim the plant was completely destroyed, but the extent of the damage has not been officially confirmed.

No power means no water

An outage does not just mean a dark living room. Without electricity, the pumping stations that keep pressure in the water mains stop, and people on the upper floors are left without water. Longer cuts put sewage pumps and heating plants at risk, and hospitals cannot rely on backup generators forever. Kharkiv's CHP-5 is a key source of power and heat for the city - and if it is not repaired before the heating season, winter there will start much earlier than the calendar says.

The Kyiv authorities say they have prepared around 1,120 generators for hospitals and social institutions, 69 mobile boiler units and roughly 1,300 points where people can warm up, charge their phones and get basic help. Another 4,500 or so devices - generators, batteries and inverters - have been bought for apartment buildings. It sounds like a lot, until you compare it with a city of millions. Mayor Vitali Klitschko had already warned of a possible serious utilities crisis, and advised those who can to consider temporarily leaving the capital during long outages.

A night at Moscow's airports

On 9 October Muscovites felt the war too, just in a different way. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defences had intercepted 15 drones flying towards the Russian capital, and Russian media reported loud explosions in the southern parts of the city. According to Azerbaijan's APA agency, in 24 hours Moscow's airports saw more than 370 delays and 62 cancelled flights - most of them at Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo. Vnukovo, Zhukovsky and Domodedovo airports were shut for six to seven hours overnight, with normal operations resuming around 7 in the morning. Claims are circulating online that Vladimir Putin also had trouble getting back to Moscow from the CIS summit in Turkmenistan - nobody has confirmed that so far.

To the west, Poland scrambled military aircraft overnight because of the Russian strikes near the NATO border and put its air defence systems on the highest level of readiness. The difference between the two capitals is in what gets counted: in Moscow, cancelled flights; in Kyiv, hours with electricity. The Balkans remember well what winter looks like in a city with no power and no water, with candles and buckets on the stairs. How many nights can a city hold out before "temporarily leaving" becomes the only plan?