Ukraine endures deep freeze as strikes briefly ease (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Let's move to Ukraine, because the Kremlin says Vladimir Putin has agreed to halt attacks on Kyiv until Sunday. The latest round of talks on ending the war is due to take place in the United Arab Emirates on the same day. A spokesman in Moscow said Mr Putin had agreed to the request because President Trump had made it personally. There were fewer Russian airstrikes on Ukraine than usual overnight, with one ballistic missile and around 100 drones fired. Temperatures in Ukraine are forecast to fall as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius in the coming days. Let's speak to our Eastern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford, who is in Kyiv for us. Sarah, the temperatures are extraordinarily low, are they not? It's difficult, I think, for those of us who haven't experienced it, to understand quite how cold we're talking about.

[00:00:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm in Dnipro in the east at the moment, but I've been in Kyiv for the past week, and yes, the temperatures have been extremely cold. The point is they're going to get much, much colder than that. We're talking about down in the low 20s, so minus 20, minus 25 degrees overnight. And that matters because there are so many people who are now living in houses that have had no heating, some of them since early January, and no electricity either. So we're talking about the kind of weather that when you breathe in, your nostril hair freezes. It is bone-chilling, it is horrific, and it is much, much worse when there's nowhere to go to keep warm. Now, Ukrainians are resilient, they have set up huge heated tents in many neighbourhoods of Kyiv in particular, which has been the worst hit, with generators keeping those tents warm. So people can go there, they can charge their devices, but ultimately they are living in freezing cold homes. We're talking about hundreds of apartment blocks in Kyiv that still haven't had the power and the heating restored to them, because the Russian attacks have come in waves, they've come over and over again, and the system is so fragile, every time the Ukrainian authorities patch it up, it breaks again very easily. So it has been a very, very difficult winter so far. And so this news announced by Donald Trump that there was going to be a pause in Russian strikes on the energy infrastructure is certainly welcome to Ukrainians. But then came the news that it was only going to last until Sunday, a couple of days. And on Sunday is precisely when, in central Ukraine, we're talking about temperatures down to minus 25 or even lower. So the idea that there could be renewed strikes I think is extremely worrying for people, even if a little bit of a pause is some relief for now.

[00:02:32] Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course, as we know, the Russians have been targeting Ukraine's energy systems, presumably so that, using it as a war tactic, that if you've got people who are cold, presumably morale is much lower. So is it in some ways a surprise that he's decided to stop this, even if it is for a short amount of time?

[00:02:55] Speaker 2: Well, there are questions about whether he really decided to stop anything, because there's always a pause between a massive attack and the next one that targets the energy infrastructure. It's usually 10 days or so anyway. So was there really a pause or is this a bit of theatre? Big question. Certainly, it's being presented as a very nice move by how Donald Trump described Vladimir Putin. I certainly would say Ukrainians don't see this as a very nice move because they have been suffering the very severe consequences of repeated attacks, not just this winter. This is the fourth winter when Russia has deliberately targeted civilian energy infrastructure. And yes, the aim is to exhaust people. It is to make them freezing cold. It's to make them turn against the authorities here, demand an end to this war, demand all sorts of things which are politically difficult for President Zelensky. It's all about draining people and it is all about sapping morale. And is it working? Well, to be quite honest, in Kiev over the past few days, I found people remarkably resilient, remarkably optimistic, despite everything. But we can't underestimate how serious those conditions are. In fact, here in the east, we're about to go and see an old lady who is freezing in her home now for the sixth day. She has an elderly husband who can't get out of bed. She's on the seventh floor. There's no lift. She can barely get up and down the stairs herself. So life is extremely, extremely hard. Any less up in that situation is to be welcome. But as I say, people are looking at this lasting for a day or two at most and then they genuinely believe that the attacks will resume again after that.

[00:04:20] Speaker 1: For the moment, our Eastern Europe correspondent Sarah Rainsford there. Thank you so much, Sarah Rainsford, there with the conditions as those temperatures are due to hit minus 20, minus 30 across parts of Ukraine over the weekend.