In the winter of 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, people burned books and furniture to keep warm. Water froze in pipes. Electricity vanished for the duration of the war. Children slept in coats and hats, their breath visible in dark rooms. Cold itself became a weapon of war.

I remember, when I was reporting from the Bosnian capital, seeing doctors operating by candlelight or wearing camping headlamps. I remember old people chopping wood in the park in the centre of the city until there were no trees left, then dragging it home on sledges. I remember the ground being too frozen to bury the many dead on the football pitch, which later became a cemetery. I remember a terrible, frozen day when I went to an old people’s home near a frontline and counted dead body after dead body, all frozen in their sleep.

Three decades later, I am watching another winter war – this time in Ukraine. It is a human-made catastrophe. Russia is now systematically targeting the country’s energy infrastructure.

Since last mid-autumn, attacks on power and heating systems across eastern, central and southern Ukraine – including Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv – have forced daily electricity outages. Until December, power cuts followed a grim rhythm: four hours on, four hours off, all day and night. Twelve hours of light and warmth, 12 hours of darkness and cold.

According to Ukraine’s minister of economy, Oleksii Sobolev, the total damage to its energy infrastructure from these attacks over the past three months will cost an estimated $1bn to address. But no statistic can capture what it means to live in a city where winter has been deliberately turned into a tool of terror.