Kyiv — It was another cold morning without electricity in Dorohozhichi, a district in the northwest of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

Between Monday night and Tuesday morning, Russian drones and missiles targeted energy facilities across Kiev as temperatures dropped to minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it was the first Russian attack on Kiev’s energy infrastructure since President Trump announced during a January 29 cabinet meeting that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin had agreed to pause strikes on Ukrainian towns and cities for a week.

Five days of respite, according to the engineers who worked on the damaged electrical substation in Dorohozhychi on Tuesday morning, was not long enough.

“Since there is a severe frost outside right now, the load on the power grids and equipment is increasing and it is being consumed,” Maxim Yevchuk, an engineer at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity supplier, told CBS News.

Yevchuk and his team managed to repair the substation in Dorohozhychi, but expected to face similar problems in other districts of Kyiv during the day. The fundamental problems behind the long blackouts, they said, will continue regardless of the intensity of the Russian strikes.

“We have an emergency situation like this almost every day,” Yevchuk said, explaining that a combination of Russian attacks and extreme weather has overwhelmed the country’s power grid.

Due to overload, he said, minor technical failures “now lead to power outages for entire settlements.”

The energy truce ends on the eve of peace talks

Discussion of an “energy truce” — with both sides halting attacks on each other’s power infrastructure — emerged after the first trilateral peace talks held between Ukrainian, Russian and US officials in Abu Dhabi in late January.

President Trump announced during a post-summit cabinet meeting that he had asked Putin to pause strikes on energy infrastructure and that the Russian leader had agreed.

“Our teams discussed this in the United Arab Emirates,” Zelenskyy said in a social media post a few weeks ago. We expect the realization of the agreement. De-escalation steps contribute to real progress towards ending the war.”

Now, as Ukrainian, Russian and US officials plan to return to Abu Dhabi for the second round of trilateral talks, currently scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, the mood has changed.

Russia launched 450 drones and more than 60 missiles at Ukraine overnight on Tuesday, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha, who said the attack left 1,170 residential buildings in Kiev without heating.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he said the strikes showed that “attitudes in Moscow have not changed: they continue to bet on war and the destruction of Ukraine, and they do not take diplomacy seriously. The work of our negotiating team will adapt to this.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte echoed Zelensky’s views during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday, saying members of the Ukrainian parliament that, “Russian attacks like those last night do not signal seriousness about peace.”

There was no immediate response from Moscow to the criticism.

Both Rutte and Zelenskyy emphasized Ukraine’s ability to withstand the most difficult months of the war.

“Putin thought for a long time that he could wait for us, that Ukraine is weak, that your supporters will get tired, that our will will give way,” Rutte said in his speech. “He made a bad mistake. Ukraine is strong, and our support is unwavering.”

As the energy crisis deepens, opinion polls conducted in Ukraine appear to support Rutte’s assessment of the nation’s resolve. A Jan. 23-29 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 65% of Ukrainian respondents said they were “ready to endure war as long as necessary” to secure what they perceive as a just peace.

According to DTEK, Monday night’s attack was the worst so far in 2026 and the 12th major attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the past four months alone.

Yevchuk said his crew’s job “doesn’t change from attack to attack.”

Every day they remain focused on the same task: “We continue to do whatever it takes to give our customers as much power as possible.”