Living Without Electricity in Kyiv
The attacks on power generation are awkward. To my eye, if Putin can keep up the attacks and inflict damage more quickly than it can be repaired, Ukraine ends up with increasingly long blackouts each day, and then maybe days of blackouts. Cities do not work without power, in ways we can hardly imagine - for example, you can’t buy anything, because the tills no longer work.
You could in theory use cash, with the shops keeping a pile of ready cash at each till for this, but how do you as a customer get cash when the ATMs are not working because the power is out?
The metro shuts down, of course. So do the traffic lights. How do you get into the city, or from A to B? you can walk, but only so far, and when you get to your destination, if it’s an office block, the elevators are not working. Automatic sliding doors are okay, you can force them open - but then you can’t really shut them, I think, so it gets cold.
How do you work from home, when the power is out - your laptop may be working, but you have no Internet.
Also when power is out, I think water goes out too, after a little while.
I need to buy some of those large containers of water, for home, in case needed.
I’ve been laying in some non-perishable foods, but most of what I eat is fresh and is in the fridge - fine for 24 hours, but after that, mmm. I will need to adapt my diet, and my life, to getting stuff done while electricity is available, and… getting other stuff done, which does not need power, when it’s not.
Needless to say, heating and lighting are off the menu. That’s fine so far, I’m in a well insulated apartment and it’s not yet cold (4C today, but sitting in a quilt is just fine), and lighting isn’t needed when you work at a laptop.
Thinking swimming might be off the menu today too - I guess the pool is closed when the power is out, and also the air raid warning is currently active, and I expect more attacks on power generation; worst thing is if you’re in the pool, and the warning kicks off. You have to leave! only happened once, fortunately - I’ve been very lucky, as every time apart from that the warning has kicked off just as I rolled up to the pool, so I just got on with something else and came back later.
Well, in any event, back to coding :-) I’ve an AWS Redshift instance up right now, for dev work; if the power abruptly fails, I’ll be paying for until the power comes back - I could run an EC2 instance, and heartbeat to it, and when the heartbeat dies, it shuts down the cluster and itself… but that’s a lot of work and debugging and testing. I’d rather just wait the four hours :-)
Water: a teaspoon (5ml) of plain bleach per litre should keep it safe to drink for months. It won't taste or smell nice, but it won't kill you.
Food: if the max temp outside is 4C, then that's your fridge. Food should last a week. Maybe a tradesman's tool chest screwed to the roof (if you have roof access), with a padlock?
Thanks for the update!
Most apartments in Ukraine probably have a balcony (the Soviets really insisted on them for some reason), so that shouldn't be a problem.
I took out a bunch of cash from an ATM.
Water - going to pick up a big canister of mineral water and lug it home. Maybe roll it home :-)
Food, that's going to be a learning curve, if it comes to it.
And we can also thank the Iranian mullahs and IRGC for making this possible. This is the world the IRGC has been pushing for for decades.
EDIT: in case you're interested, a link to what is going on:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-repo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerability_of_nuclear_plant...
These whataboutisms are tiresome and off topic.
> Putin's terrorist attacks against civilian infrastructure make no military sense.
(Points out that there's plenty of military precedent for this, aside from it being an obvious tactic)
> WHATABOUTISM!
maybe you can see how this behavior ruins discourse and guarantees you get dumber over time, but I doubt it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulnerability_of_nuclear_plant...
So yes, power plants are probable targets in war.
The line of argument against that is obviously "but Hitler tried it in Britain and it didn't work", but for the majority of history it did work.
When electricity is disabled, civilian life takes a massive hit. As the OP shows in his post, modern cities don't work all that well without electricity. And remember: Food for the soldiers, heating in their army base, etc, all run on it. So with winter approaching it will most likely be very uncomfortable, as the heating requirements are obviously magnified.
Of course, there is an option to mitigate it: oil/gas/coal. Where will the civil society get this oil/gas? Fossil fuels are probably the one thing that NATO cannot supply this winter(remember that Ukraine was until recently exporting energy to Europe, namely Poland), given how horrible the markets are in general. And remember that any oil that is used to heat something could have been used to fuel a tank.
To summarize, there are very real reasons to bomb civilian infrastructure for a military goal. The civilian society is the one that supports the war effort and provides the army with a lot of stuff they need to fight, and in the modern world civilian society needs electricity to run. Given that Putin is now resorting to such tactics, the next step for him would be openly bombing electricity lines and railroads.
NATO has to take these attacks very seriously, in a military context. Don't know how they will do it but they need to figure out how to get Ukraine electricity this winter.