Ukrainian troops in winter 2025

In the winter of 2025–26, Ukrainian soldiers are serving in a country that shivers in the dark. Russian missile and drone campaigns have methodically gone after power plants, gas production facilities and high-voltage substations, knocking out huge portions of Ukraine’s energy system and forcing long blackouts in cities and frontline regions alike. While humanitarians write winter response plans and diplomats argue over frozen Russian assets, the people who feel this most directly are the men and women living in dugouts, prefabs and broken houses along a front that stretches hundreds of kilometres.

On paper, Ukraine is better equipped for winter now than she was in the early years of the full-scale invasion. Volunteer networks and foreign donors have supplied better sleeping bags, thermal clothing and pot-bellied stoves. In practice, winter remains a second enemy. Average temperatures around the front line hover below freezing, and dry cold is often replaced by wet sleet that turns black earth into glue. For the infantry, winter is not a season so much as a texture: mud, ice, smoke and the constant buzzing of unmanned aircraft in the low grey sky.

Serhii, a thirty-two-year-old infantryman near Pokrovsk, describes his day as a series of brief, exhausting bursts.

‘You never really sleep,’ he says. ‘You just lie there in your clothes, boots on, listening to the sky. First you hear the generator, then the drone over the generator, then the shell that goes for the generator. After that you sit in the dark and hope your battery lasts until morning.’

Generators have become as important as rifles. They power radios, starlink terminals, drones and the battered mobile phones on which soldiers see their families’ faces. Every generator becomes a target. Russian reconnaissance drones circle overhead almost constantly now, their presence so normal that silence feels more alarming than the faint electric whine. One mortar officer puts it simply: ‘We work when the weather works for us. Fog is our air defence.’

The trenches themselves are a compromise between history and improvisation. In places they resemble First World War positions, with duckboards, overhead cover and firing bays, as units invest months of labour into digging survivable foxholes that protect against both shell fragments and the vertical threat of drones. In others they are nothing more than shoulder-deep scrapes behind tree lines, or basements knocked through with adjoining holes. Snow hides trip-wires and anti-personnel mines. Frozen ground makes it difficult to dig new positions, so battered line after battered line is held almost by habit.

Mykola serves in an assault company in the east. He gestures at a dugout roof patched with sandbags and bits of sheet metal.

‘In summer we fought the mud and the flies', he says. ‘Now we fight the smoke from our own stove. We burn anything that will catch. Wet wood, rubbish, bits of furniture from the houses in the grey zone. You wake up coughing from the smoke and you are thankful, because if you can smell smoke it means you are still alive to smell something.’

The cold slips into bones and joints. Old wounds ache, new ones become infected more easily when soldiers cannot wash properly. Frostbite is less common than in the first winter, because the army now issues better boots and socks, but numb fingers under cheap gloves still fumble with safety catches and tourniquets. Rotations are meant to be more frequent in the bitter months, a few days at the line followed by time in a warmer shelter further back. In reality, shortages of trained manpower and the intensity of Russian attacks mean that many units simply stay longer forward and sleep in their body armour under half-frozen blankets.

For those on drone or artillery duty, winter is a paradox. Visibility can improve as leaves fall and snow reflects light, making camouflage harder and exposing any movement. At the same time low cloud, snow and freezing rain interfere with satellite signals, optics and batteries. Drone crews huddle in unheated containers, flying quadcopters whose flight times shrink sharply in the cold. When the charge runs out faster than expected and an expensive machine drops somewhere out over no man’s land, there is a physical flinch that is almost guilt.

Andriy, a drone operator from a volunteer-raised unit, describes it bluntly.

‘In summer, the screen shows dust and fire. In winter it shows black shapes on white ground. You see everything. A wounded man trying to crawl leaves a trail. A body freezes into a landmark, and you keep seeing it on every flight. You learn the dead by their shadows.’

Psychological exhaustion thickens in winter. The lack of daylight, the longer stretches inside dugouts and prefabs, the monotony of the same hundred metres of destroyed landscape, all weigh on men who have been at war for almost four years. Casualty figures, now running into hundreds of thousands on both sides, are statistics in news reports and briefing notes. At the front they are the empty places on the sleeping platform, the trench corner where someone’s boots used to stand.

Oleksandr, a platoon sergeant, describes the way time bends.

‘You get messages from home about things like elections, power cuts, scandals. You read that Russia hit some power plant and half of Kyiv is dark. We smile because here we have been in the dark for weeks already. Then someone you know is killed and that day lasts for a month.’

The line between front and rear is thin. Russian missile and drone strikes on energy infrastructure mean that the bases, training grounds and hospitals behind the front are also cold and intermittently without power. Families in cities queue for water and charge their phones in shopping centres with generators. Soldiers on leave find themselves climbing fourteen flights of stairs to dark flats, boiling water on gas camping stoves and sleeping in outdoor clothes because the radiators are cold. The respite that leave ought to bring is blunted by the fact that the whole country is living a diluted version of trench life.

There is, however, a particular harshness reserved for the newly mobilised who arrive at the front in winter. Training centres have struggled to keep pace with mobilisation demands, and the intensity of drone, artillery and glide-bomb bombardments means that units learn under fire rather than in neat exercises.

Yurii, a former lorry driver who was called up six months earlier, tries to explain the shock.

‘They tell you in training that it will be difficult, that there will be drones and bombs. You nod. Then you come here and you realise the sky is never empty. There is always something buzzing, or whistling, or humming. At night you lie in the frozen mud and count the sounds. The worst is the silence just before a strike. That silence is louder than the explosion.’

Coping mechanisms are as improvised as everything else. Some units have built small saunas or bathhouses near the line, using scavenged timber and plastic sheeting, so that men can strip off the lice-infested wool for an hour and remember that their skin is not permanently grey. Others have adopted cats and dogs that wander in from abandoned villages, half-wild mascots who catch rats and offer wordless comfort.

In one dugout, a young soldier called Ilya shows a battered paperback he keeps in a plastic bag.

‘It is not a good book,’ he admits. ‘But it smells like my old flat, not like this bunker. When the generator works, I listen to music and imagine I am going to work on the tram in the morning. That is all. Just going to work. My dream is to be bored again.’

Religion and superstition blend. Icons nailed to trench walls blacken with soot from stoves. Some men wear small drone-shaped pendants made by volunteers, as if the symbol of their greatest fear could somehow shield them. Others grow moustaches or refuse to shave before an operation, clinging to private rituals in a war that has mechanised death to a degree that would have stunned their grandfathers.

The command’s attempt to keep units cohesive through rotation and rest is hampered by the hard arithmetic of attrition. Ukraine has lost tens of thousands of soldiers killed and more wounded since 2022, and Russia has suffered still greater losses - a whole order of magnitude greater. The scale of this grinding consumption of human beings is difficult to reconcile with the small, fierce acts of solidarity in the trenches. Men share the last dry socks, the last cigarette, the last charge on a power bank. When a drone buzz sounds overhead, there is a practised choreography of throwing themselves on top of one another to shield the least experienced, as though bodies could outvote gravity and shrapnel.

Women serve in growing numbers, in medical units, drone teams, artillery and even assault infantry. The winter is particularly cruel to medics who must kneel in snow slush to apply tourniquets, hands bare in order to feel pulses and veins. Blood freezes on combat gloves and becomes stiff brown crusts. Evacuating a casualty along icy, shell-scarred tracks requires the same slow, meticulous driving that lorry drivers once used on mountain roads, only now with the knowledge that a single missed turn may bring the vehicle into line of sight of an anti-tank crew guided by a quadcopter.

Kateryna, a combat medic, describes a night evacuation after a glide bomb hit their position.

‘We had three wounded in the back and one dead', she says. ‘The wounded were begging for water, but the bottles were solid ice. So we put them near the engine block to thaw while we drove. One man kept apologising for bleeding on the floor. I told him: “Bleed as much as you like, just keep your heart beating.” That is winter here. You are negotiating with cold and blood at the same time.’

Yet in spite of all this there is still humour, often of the darkest kind. Soldiers draw cartoons on the dugout walls of drones with hangovers, of Russian tanks stuck in snowdrifts, of generals slipping on ice. Whole units compete to see who can build the most elaborate trench furniture from captured enemy kit. Someone rigs a Christmas tree from camouflage net and empty shell cases and hangs sweets sent from schoolchildren in Lviv. Long nights are filled with stories, arguments about football, complaints about politicians, jokes about ration packs and speculation about peace plans that seem to shift with each news cycle.

For many, the hardest burden of winter 2025–26 is the sense of uncertainty. Analysts speak of scenarios, of possible ceasefires and frozen conflicts, of offensives that may or may not come when the ground hardens. The soldiers at the front live inside these scenarios without knowing which line of the report will become their future. Every trench improvement, every sandbag carried through the snow, is a statement of faith that they will be here long enough for this labour to matter.

At the end of his shift one night, Serhii steps out of the dugout to smoke. The sky is the colour of lead. Somewhere to the rear a generator coughs into life, and a moment later the distant buzz of a drone starts up above it. He shakes his head and smiles without humour.

‘They say the winter will be decisive’, he murmurs. ‘Every winter is decisive when you are freezing. For us, decisive means simple things. Hot tea. Dry socks. One more day alive. If we manage that, maybe the politicians will manage the rest.’

Life for Ukrainian soldiers in this winter is lived in these small units of endurance. Breath on cold air, the warmth of a tin mug between cracked fingers, the fragile noise of a song sung quietly in a dugout so as not to waste battery on a speaker. The war’s grand strategies might be decided in ministries and foreign capitals, but its outcome is still being shaped every night by people who watch the sky, count the seconds between drone buzz and explosion, and choose again to go back up the frozen trench ladder when their turn comes.