All talk in Abu Dhabi, all suffering in Ukraine

Saturday 24 January 2026

As negotiators convene in the calm, air-conditioned rooms of Abu Dhabi, Ukraine freezes.

Representatives of the United States, Ukraine and Russia speak the language of process, sequencing and confidence-building measures. Draft texts circulate. Assurances are given. The rhetoric of peace, however tentative, fills the communiqués. Yet at the very same hour, Russian missiles and drones arc across Ukrainian skies, seeking not military formations at the front but transformers, substations and power plants far from it.

This dissonance has become a defining feature of the war’s third winter. Diplomacy proceeds by daylight. Punishment descends by night.

Across the country, the consequences are immediate and brutally intimate. Electricity cuts cascade into heating failures. Water systems falter as pumps lose power. Hospitals shift once more to generators, rationing fuel as carefully as medicines. Families huddle in darkened flats, counting the hours until power might return, knowing that another strike may render such calculations meaningless. In cities such across Ukraine, from west to east, from north to south, winter is not merely a season but a weapon.

There is nothing accidental about this pattern. The systematic targeting of energy infrastructure has long been a central pillar of Russia’s strategy. It is designed to exhaust civilian morale, to place unbearable strain on the Ukrainian state and to remind Europe that Ukrainian suffering can be amplified at will. That these attacks continue unabated while talks are under way is not a contradiction from Moscow’s perspective. It is leverage. Negotiations are not a pause in violence but another theatre in which pressure is applied.

For Ukrainians, however, the message received is stark. Talks abroad do not mean respite at home. The promise of diplomacy offers little comfort when lifts do not run, when elderly neighbours climb icy stairwells by candlelight and when parents wonder whether schools will close again because classrooms cannot be heated. Winter strips war of abstraction. It reduces geopolitics to the temperature of a room and the light of a bulb.

The moral cost of this strategy is profound. International humanitarian law draws a clear line between military objectives and the means necessary for civilian survival. Energy systems in mid-winter sit squarely on that line. To destroy them deliberately is to accept civilian suffering not as collateral damage but as intended effect. Each missile that plunges a district into darkness further corrodes any claim that negotiations are pursued in good faith.

For Ukraine’s partners, this moment should provoke discomfort. To sit at the negotiating table while the civilian population of one party is collectively punished risks normalising the very conduct diplomacy purports to end. Process cannot be allowed to eclipse reality. Words spoken in Abu Dhabi do not warm Ukrainian homes.

And yet Ukraine endures. Repair crews work under the threat of follow-up strikes. Engineers cannibalise damaged equipment to keep fragments of the grid alive. Communities organise warming centres and share generators. There is resilience here, but it is a resilience extracted at immense human cost.

If negotiations are to mean anything, they must be tethered to the lived experience of those most affected by the war. A ceasefire that exists only on paper, while power stations burn, is no ceasefire at all. Peace cannot be built in conference halls alone. It must begin with the simple, urgent act of allowing civilians to live through the winter without fear that the next explosion will extinguish both light and heat.

Until that happens, the contrast will remain obscene. Diplomacy in the desert. Darkness in Ukraine.