Electricity blackouts in Lviv

The Russian missile and drone strikes on the night of 5–6 December 2025 marked a grim return to the energy war against Ukraine. Once again, power stations and substations across the country were deliberately struck, including facilities serving Lviv oblast, as part of a coordinated barrage of more than 700 air targets aimed at critical infrastructure. In the aftermath, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry and grid operator introduced tightened hourly blackout schedules in all regions, and in Lviv the local distributor, Lvivoblenergo, began publishing outage timetables that left many households without electricity for much of the day and night. For civilian communities in Lviv, the result has been several days of heavy blackouts just as winter temperatures hover around freezing.

We consider how such extended and repeated power cuts affect the daily life of a city that has already borne nearly four years of war: the physical hardship, the disruption of essential services, the impact upon work and education, the psychological strain, and the ways in which Lviv’s society adapts and resists.

A city plunged in and out of darkness

In the simplest terms, electricity blackouts mean darkness and cold. Yet in a modern European city they also mean silence where there should be noise, and paralysis where there should be movement. Following the attacks of 5–6 December, power engineers reported significant damage to generation and transmission facilities in eight regions, including Lviv, and more than 600,000 consumers across Ukraine temporarily without electricity. Because the national grid cannot yet produce and transmit sufficient power to meet demand, Ukrenergo has ordered round-the-clock rolling cuts, with official schedules that often translate into 12 to 16 hours per day without electricity for many consumers.

For a typical apartment block in Lviv, this means days structured not by the clock on a mobile telephone, but by the power company’s tables: group numbers, on and off windows, small rectangles of time when lifts, lights and sockets work, and longer stretches when none of them do. Families study these schedules, screenshot them, share them in Viber chats and neighbourhood Telegram channels. They rearrange their lives around them. If electricity is promised from 11.30 until 16.30, one cooks, washes clothes, charges every device, and queues for the lift with heavy bags. When the lights go out again, the city shifts into a lower gear.

At street level, the effects are immediately visible. Street lighting fails in entire districts. Traffic lights at major intersections go dark, leaving drivers and pedestrians to improvise right-of-way rules with torches and dipped headlights. Trams and trolleybuses stop in mid-route or operate on reduced frequency. Some shops, pharmacies and cafés keep going with small generators; others close altogether during blackout periods, their windows dim, card terminals dead and fridges slowly warming.

Cold, water and basic physical security

The most acute concern in December is not only light, but warmth. When outside temperatures in Lviv linger around freezing, prolonged power cuts place strain upon every form of heating that depends upon pumps, fans or control units. For apartments connected to central district heating, circulation pumps may fail during cuts, leading to uneven warmth in radiators. For dwellings with electric boilers or heat pumps the problem is more straightforward: without electricity, there is no heat at all.

Water and sanitation are just as vulnerable. Many multi-storey buildings rely upon electric pumps to deliver water to higher floors or to maintain pressure. During long outages, residents on upper levels find that taps slow to a trickle or stop altogether. Toilets cannot be flushed normally, and people begin storing water in bathtubs, buckets and bottles during the brief hours when pumps work. Refuse collection also becomes more complicated, as compactors and depot facilities depend upon stable electricity supply.

There is a quiet but real safety dimension to this. Dark stairwells and courtyards create more opportunities for petty crime or assault. Elderly residents are reluctant to descend several flights of poorly lit stairs for fear of falling, particularly if lifts are inoperative for much of the day. Parents shepherd children home earlier, unwilling to let them walk through unlit streets. Fire hazards rise as more people rely on candles, gas burners and improvised heating devices.

Hospitals, clinics and pharmacies

Critical institutions such as hospitals have priority access to diesel generators and backup systems, and Ukraine has devoted considerable effort since 2022 to hardening these facilities against power cuts. Nevertheless several days of heavy blackouts place them under pressure. Generators require fuel deliveries that must be organised and protected. The constant switching between grid power and generator power is technically stressful for sensitive equipment.

Large hospitals in Lviv can, for the most part, cope with such conditions, although with increased costs and strain on staff. Smaller clinics and private medical practices, however, do not always have robust backup. Routine tests, diagnostic imaging, elective procedures and non-urgent consultations are postponed or rescheduled into the limited windows when electricity is guaranteed. Refrigeration of medicines, including vaccines and insulin, becomes a concern wherever backup systems are limited. Pharmacies that lack generators may have to close for hours at a time, complicating access to regular medication.

For patients with chronic conditions, this adds a further layer of anxiety to daily life. The question is no longer simply whether the necessary medicine is in stock, which has been a recurring problem during the war, but whether the pharmacy will be open, lit and able to process payment at the moment one arrives. Those dependent upon electrical medical devices at home, such as oxygen concentrators, face particularly harsh choices: investing in their own small generators or battery systems if they can afford them, or moving in temporarily with relatives whose buildings have more reliable supply.

Work, income and inequality

Lviv has functioned throughout the war as an economic and administrative rear base, hosting relocated businesses and institutions from the east of the country. Many of these are in services that depend heavily upon uninterrupted power and connectivity: information technology, outsourcing, design, legal, financial and cultural work. Repeated long blackouts undermine their productivity and revenue. Internet routers go down when the electricity does, unless the building or the provider has invested in batteries. Mobile networks operate on backup power only as long as their own batteries and generators last.

Large employers and state institutions in the city centre are better placed to adapt. They can equip offices with generators, install battery storage, or shift working hours to match outage schedules. Small shops and self-employed workers have far fewer options. A café that cannot refrigerate food or operate coffee machines for half the day will lose customers to a competitor with a generator. A hairdresser without electric lighting or water pumps cannot cut hair. A tailor or accountant in a small office might find their entire working day confined to a six-hour window of electricity.

In this way, prolonged blackouts deepen existing inequalities. Households with savings can purchase gas cookers, power banks, inverters and small generators, and they can relocate temporarily to better supplied neighbourhoods or even to rural houses with stoves and wells. Poorer families, including many internally displaced people who have sought refuge in Lviv, must cope with whatever minimal infrastructure is available in their rented flats or collective accommodation. The result is a patchwork city in which some flats glow with the hum of private backup devices while others sit cold and dark for much of the day.

Education and children

For children and students the effects are both practical and psychological. Schooling in Ukraine has already been repeatedly disrupted by missile alerts, displacement and the need to mix in-person and online learning. Electricity blackouts now add yet another layer of uncertainty. Schools with adequate shelters and generators can continue classes during cuts, but not all institutions are so equipped. If heating or lighting cannot be guaranteed, lessons may be shortened or postponed, particularly for younger children.

At home, online homework or distance learning depends upon the availability of both electricity and internet connectivity. A family may possess a laptop and a mobile telephone with a power bank, yet both are useless if there is no electricity to charge them for sixteen hours and the mobile network is overloaded. Children revise in the glare of battery lamps, and parents juggle scarce power sockets between their own work and their offspring’s study.

On a psychological level, repeated evenings in darkness with air raid sirens still a routine occurrence reinforce a sense of abnormality that has already lasted far too long. For younger children, the blackout can be frightening, especially when it coincides with the noise of explosions in the distance. For adolescents, it is both an inconvenience and a reminder that their adolescence is being lived under conditions of war that their parents never anticipated for them.

Social life, faith and community solidarity

Lviv is a city rich in cafés, churches, cultural institutions and informal meeting places, which help to sustain social life in wartime. Extended blackouts alter but do not destroy this fabric. Some establishments invest in generators and advertise themselves as “points of invincibility” where people can charge phones, warm themselves and drink hot tea. Others revert to an older rhythm of life: daylight hours for socialising, early evenings at home, gatherings by candlelight.

Churches and religious communities play a particular role. Many possess their own generators and become hubs for local support, distributing hot drinks, food and blankets, and offering spiritual consolation. Volunteer networks that have been active since the early months of the full-scale invasion adapt once more, this time to deliver power banks, candles and fuel, and to check on those who are isolated.

These forms of solidarity do not fully offset the hardship, but they do shape how it is experienced. A family that spends several hours in the local parish hall, with light, warmth and other people, endures the blackout differently from a pensioner alone in a cold flat. In this sense, social capital becomes a form of energy resilience: dense, active communities cushion the worst effects of infrastructural fragility.

Information, communication and the digital state

Ukraine’s wartime administration relies heavily upon digital communication. Government announcements, air-raid alerts, banking, ticketing, social benefits and even some legal documents have migrated to mobile applications and online platforms. In ordinary times, this has been a strength. Under conditions of rolling blackouts, however, the digital state depends upon very analogue infrastructure: electricity in sockets, batteries in base stations, diesel in generators.

When both electricity and mobile internet are intermittent, citizens can miss important updates about air raid alerts, heating, water supply or changes in blackout schedules. Lvivoblenergo and Ukrenergo urge residents to consult official websites and Telegram channels for the latest information, yet these are accessible only intermittently. People revert to older methods: listening to battery-powered radios, asking neighbours, or simply looking out of the window to see whether nearby buildings have light.

For many, the most disturbing aspect is the temporary loss of connection with relatives fighting at the front or living abroad. When mobile networks sag under the strain of power cuts, messages cannot be sent or received, and video calls become impossible. In a country where almost every family has someone in uniform or displaced, such loss of contact, even for several hours, is a heavy additional emotional burden.

Psychological impact and political meaning

Several days of severe blackouts in winter are not merely a technical inconvenience. They are part of a deliberate Russian strategy to erode Ukrainian morale by attacking civilian infrastructure far from the front lines, a strategy that international observers have repeatedly criticised as a form of terror against the civilian population. The intention is to revive the fear and exhaustion of the winter of 2022–2023, when Ukrainians endured some of the harshest energy shortages in Europe.

For the people of Lviv, however, this new wave of attacks comes after nearly four years of war experience and earlier strikes on the region, including a particularly large attack in October 2025 that hit civilian infrastructure and caused casualties in Lviv oblast. The psychological response is therefore complex. There is certainly anger and fatigue. Every further night of missile alerts followed by a day of outages pushes some closer to despair, or at least to a numb acceptance that normality will not return soon. War weariness is real, and blackouts amplify it.

Yet there is also a hardening of resolve. Many residents understand that the purpose of these strikes is to coerce Ukraine into political concessions by making daily life unbearable. The visible efforts of power engineers, who work long hours under dangerous conditions to restore supply, have become a source of civic pride, and their success in keeping the grid functioning, however imperfectly, is widely celebrated. Social media fill with images of candles, jokes about “romantic blackouts”, and practical tips for cooking on camping stoves or insulating windows with whatever materials are available. The humour is sometimes dark, but it is a form of resistance.

Life between outages

The several days so far of heavy electricity blackouts in Lviv following the attacks of 5–6 December 2025 reveal once again how deeply modern urban life is entangled with energy infrastructure. The effects upon civilian communities are not limited to the absence of light in the evenings. They extend to heating, water, healthcare, work, education, social relations and mental health. These effects are distributed unequally, falling hardest upon the poor, the elderly, the sick and the displaced.

Yet the blackouts also illuminate certain strengths. Lviv’s communities have learnt to live between outages, to preserve essential functions in narrow windows of electricity, and to construct informal support systems that mitigate the harshest impacts. The city remains a rear refuge and logistical hub for a country at war, even when its own lights flicker.

Russia’s renewed assault upon Ukraine’s energy system has succeeded in making civilian life more difficult, colder and darker. It has not, however, extinguished the determination of Lviv’s inhabitants to endure, adapt and insist that their country shall continue to function as a European society even under bombardment. Life goes on, lived in cycles of power and blackout, but lived nonetheless.