Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Svitlana Zinovieva in the tent she and her daughter, Oleksandra Buzko, placed on a bed to stay warm in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. “It’s really very cozy,” Ms. Zinovieva said of the makeshift arrangement. With defiant ingenuity, Kyiv residents are trying to find ways to stay warm in a cruel winter. By  Andrew E. Kramer Visuals by  Lynsey Addario Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine Feb. 10, 2026, The New York Times Svitlana Zinovieva wiped icy condensation from her living room window and pointed to a smokestack rising from a central boiler heating her apartment block. There, in the distance, she had seen a Russian missile streak in and explode a few days before. “It was like fireworks,” she said. “But I knew it would soon be cold.” Not long after, the bitter chill of the coldest winter in a decade in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, was seeping into her apartment. Ms. Zinovieva quickly adopted new routines, like countless other Ukrainians coping with Russia’s unrelenting assaults on their co...