Children across Ukraine are facing an increasingly dire winter as intensified attacks on energy and water infrastructure leave families without heating, electricity and basic services, the country representative of UNICEF said Friday.
Munir Mammadzade told reporters in Geneva that the situation for children had reached a critical point as sub-zero temperatures gripped the country. "Children in Ukraine are under fire and freezing right now and enduring the hardest winter of war," he said, describing conditions as "a crisis within a crisis."
With temperatures in Kyiv dropping to minus 15 C (5 F) and expected to fall further, Mammadzade said millions of families are again enduring days without heating, electricity or water. "So children and families are in constant survival mode because of that," he said, warning that life in high-rise buildings has become about "staying safe from incessant attacks and surviving extreme temperatures."
He said winter and nationwide strikes on energy infrastructure mean "there is no place for children in Ukraine where they can be safe," shifting humanitarian concern from frontline areas to urban centers, including the capital.
UNICEF, he said, is supporting spaces set up by Ukrainian emergency services outside residential areas where families can warm up, access hot food, charge devices and receive psychosocial support.
Mammadzade warned that "darkness and freezing temperatures intensify fear and stress" and could worsen both physical and mental health.
"Hypothermia is one of the concerns we have for the newborns right now," he said, stressing that "it is quickly becoming a life-threatening element in terms of absence of warmth and medical care." According to the country representative, there are no reported cases of child death due to cold at this stage.
Education has also been further disrupted, he said, as schools move online amid power outages that leave children without connectivity. UNICEF is assisting 1.65 million people, including 470,000 children, through its winter response, providing generators, cash assistance and support to schools.
Nearly four years into the war launched by Russia, Mammadzade said childhood in Ukraine remains overshadowed by survival, noting an 11% rise in verified child casualties in 2025, according to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
By Beyza Binnur Donmez in Geneva
Anadolu Agency
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