# EXPLAINER: Why the UN finally calls Russia’s cold a crime against humanity > A man in Kyiv. Fifty-three years old. Last winter. One precise fear. Not the missiles. Not the sirens. “The scariest thing was to fall asleep and not to wake up.” - Author: Maxime Marquette - Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co) - Section: Analysis - Published: 2026-10-27 - Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/explainer-why-the-un-finally-calls-russia-s-cold-a-crime-against-humanity ## Key takeaways - The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, created by the Human Rights Council in March 2022, submitted its report to the General Assembly, released October 26 in New York and Vienna. - Intentionally targeting civilian energy facilities is described as a war crime, while the wider campaign, framed as a state policy, is described as a crime against humanity in the form of other inhumane acts. - The commission says Russian commanders knew the heating facilities were vital in winter, and Russian authorities officially declared their intention to continue. - It gathered 255 testimonies across nine Ukrainian regions and documented the physical and mental harm of prolonged cold, especially for elderly and disabled people. - The report also covers trafficking of men from 29 countries into the Russian army; Moscow refused the commission access to examine Ukrainian strikes in Russia and occupied areas. ## Falling asleep and not waking up ### The fear of a 53-year-old man A man in Kyiv. Fifty-three years old. Last winter. One precise fear. Not the missiles. Not the sirens. “The scariest thing was to fall asleep and not to wake up.” Falling asleep, nothing more. In an unheated apartment, in the heart of a European capital, sleep had become a risk. The cold worked at night. In silence. Cold makes no noise, leaves no crater, and shows up in no press photo. It works all the same. A missile can be seen. The cold cannot. And that is exactly why it serves an army that wants to strike without leaving images. ### A 74-year-old woman Another voice. A woman. Seventy-four years old. “I lay cold and hungry, without medicine, without anything.” Nothing at all. These two witnesses are not characters in a novel; they appear in an official United Nations report. Their winter has a name. A heavy name. It has just landed. These two anonymous voices carry the whole weight of the report, heavier than any official figure. One night’s sleep. One blanket. ## What the commission concluded ### Three commissioners, one report A report, this week. Its full name: the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, created by the Human Rights Council in March 2022. Three members. Erik Møse chairs it. With Pablo de Greiff. And Vrinda Grover. They are not paid and are not UN staff, UN News specifies. Independent people. Not diplomats. The report was submitted to the General Assembly and released on October 26 in New York and Vienna. It is not talking to Kyiv. It is talking to the world. A report to the General Assembly stays in the world’s archives, long after the last press release. The findings also draw on Ukrainian authorities, doctors and non-governmental organizations, Interfax-Ukraine writes. ### Two findings, two floors Two floors. The first one first. Russian authorities intentionally attacked civilian objects, which amounts to war crimes. The second is heavier: crimes against humanity, in the form of other inhumane acts. The word humanity. Not Kyiv saying it. The UN, this time. That difference matters, because the charge no longer comes from Kyiv alone. It stays. It weighs. It bears a date. On October 26, 2026, the UN wrote in black and white what Ukrainian families had lived through for four winters. ## War crime, crime against humanity ### The difference, plainly Two crimes. Two scales. A war crime targets an act: here, hitting a civilian object, a power plant, a boiler house. One precise act. According to the commission, intentionally targeting these civilian facilities already amounts to a war crime. A crime against humanity targets a system aimed at an entire civilian population. A system. A population. The commission writes that these attacks follow a state policy to deprive civilians of energy. The key word. Policy, not blunder. A blunder gets regretted. A policy gets planned. The whole difference lies in that verb: planning suffering means wanting it before causing it. ### Why winter matters The report looks at the winter of 2025-2026. But not only that. It also measures the cumulative effect of the strikes since the fall of 2022, winter after winter. One winter is a campaign. Four winters are a plan. The logic is simple. The cold insists. It comes back every night, into every apartment cut off from heat, until bodies wear down. Lawyers call it a cumulative effect. Families put it differently. They say: again. Another winter. Another night. *A war crime hits a building. This one hit entire winters.* ## What inhumane means ### Other inhumane acts The phrase sounds vague. It is not. International law files under that name serious suffering deliberately inflicted on civilians. Here, it is called cold. Hunger. Darkness. Thirst too. Each of these words names a lack any reader has known for an hour, never for a season. Millions of Ukrainians endured prolonged cuts to heating, electricity, water and gas. Millions of them. Not thousands. An entire country lived by headlamp, in coats, counting the hours of power. ### The health of body and mind The report goes further. Prolonged cold, missing services and the constant struggle to survive damaged physical and mental health. The body. The mind too. Families with children had it particularly hard. Schools closed. Children fell ill. Nobody needs a bombing to suffer when winter is enough to do the job in its place. Moscow knows it. Moscow uses it. It counts on January. It counts on February. The coldest months become allies for an army that strikes civilians. ## A state policy, not an accident ### The commanders knew One question decides everything. Did they know? The commission answers yes. The Russian commanders who ordered these strikes knew those heating facilities were vital in winter. Vital, in winter. In big cities. They knew. They struck. Knowledge comes before the act, and that knowledge turns a strike into a deliberate choice. In that order. The law asks for nothing more to speak of intent, and the commission does not hold back. The intent is there. It is written. It is documented. ### A plan, openly claimed There is something more. Or worse. Russian authorities officially declared their intention to continue and referred to plans. No confession forced out. A claim of ownership. The Kremlin itself signed the proof investigators were looking for, through its own statements. No targeting error. No collateral damage. A policy, the UN writes. One meant to deprive civilians of electricity and inflict suffering on them, the report concludes. Suffering by design. Written, then owned. A state that claims its own cruelty spares the judges the hardest part of the job: proving the will. ## Minus 21 degrees in Ukraine ### The thermometer reading Minus 21 degrees. Last winter. That is the temperature the commission records for the past cold season. A building without heat. No electricity. No water. Outside, minus 21. Inside, barely better. Waves of hundreds of drones and missiles at once became more frequent and more intense. They also cover a wider territory, the report specifies. Wider ground. More often. An attack of hundreds of machines at once is not looking for one precise target; it is looking to saturate the defenses. ### Sleep as a risk The 53-year-old man. He was afraid to sleep. At minus 21 degrees, sleeping in a frozen apartment is no longer rest; it is a bet on the morning. A bet. Every night. The commission gathered 255 testimonies from survivors of that winter, across nine Ukrainian regions. Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, Kharkiv. Kherson, Mykolaiv, Odesa. Poltava, Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr. Nine regions, from the north of the country down to the Black Sea. 255 voices. 255 winters. *At minus 21 degrees, sleep becomes a bet on the morning.* ## Elders trapped by elevators ### Fear of the cabin One detail in the report. It chills. Elderly people and people with reduced mobility did not go to shelters during alerts. Why not? The elevators. They feared getting stuck in one during an outage, so they stayed home despite the sirens. At home. No heat. No electricity. No water. A siren that wails for someone who cannot get downstairs becomes just a noise in the night. These people chose between the risk of a strike and the risk of a stuck cabin, and they chose the cold apartment. ### The body nobody can plug in No devices. Some depended on life-support equipment, and that equipment stopped working without power. A machine without a socket. A bed without warmth. A cold bedroom. A call with no answer. That is the target. Not a soldier. An elderly person. A missile on a power plant ends its course in the bedroom of a 74-year-old woman, lying cold and hungry. That is the full route. From the plant to the bed. The path is short. It is known. ## The plant that heated a district ### CHPP-4, February 2 and 3 One precise example. February 2 and 3, 2026. The CHPP-4 plant, Kyiv. Five ballistic missiles. The toll appears on the Atlantic Council page, and it is dizzying. The result: 1,129 buildings without heat or hot water, including 46 schools and 72 kindergartens. 18 medical facilities. Hospitals and clinics were left without heat or hot water. Outside, about minus 25 degrees. A single plant. An entire district. Five missiles were enough to deprive thousands of families of heat in the dead of winter. Seventy-two kindergartens without heat in the middle of February is a target nobody can mistake for a barracks. ### The Soviet legacy Why so much damage? Central heating. A Soviet legacy. Millions still depend on it. One plant heats hundreds of buildings at once, so a single strike chills hundreds of them. The target is chosen. Not by chance. Kyiv responds with modular boilers, generators and external batteries, Odarchenko writes. Vital improvisation. Cities have expanded backup power. An entire country is learning to heat itself in small pieces so Moscow can no longer switch everything off at once. Small, but scattered. Scattered, so alive. Moscow aims at the center. Kyiv answers by multiplying small heat sources, each too modest to be worth a missile. Kyiv spreads out. Families charge their power banks. Some plan to leave the big cities for the countryside or abroad. Many cannot. Low-income families, older residents and people with disabilities will likely be hit hardest. ## Konotop, fourth day in the dark ### A town without power This is not history. It is now. Konotop, Sumy oblast. Four days without power. A drone attack on October 24 plunged the town into darkness, Jimmy Rushton reported on October 27. The mayor, Artem Semenikhin, has no forecast for the power coming back, and he says so bluntly. He speaks of “a treacherous strike on civilian infrastructure in the middle of the night.” Strong words. In the middle of the night. Always the night. Night strikes add fear to the outage, since nobody sees where the noise comes from. ### Six hours of water a day Water runs at set hours. From 6 to 9 in the morning. Then 6 to 9 p.m. Six hours a day. The rest of the time the taps stay dry, and every household organizes its day around those two windows. The hospital runs on generators. Schools are damaged. Konotop does not make the front page, but it shows the report describes the present as much as last winter. Lawmaker Viktoria Gryb explains that strikes slow repairs, because crews cannot work during alerts. She calls the pattern “systematic.” One alert, and everything stops. One strike, and everything starts over. And winter is coming. Konotop is just one town among many, and each waits its turn without knowing when. ## You will freeze, Moscow promised ### The Russian Defense Ministry’s message One sentence, published. The Russian Defense Ministry posted it itself, Kateryna Odarchenko recalls in the Atlantic Council. “In winter you will freeze.” No possible doubt. No room for interpretation. Putin called on his army to prepare “massive strikes,” the same analyst writes. Massive, he says. The word belongs to the Kremlin. The sentence is public. So is the plan. When a state writes its threats out in full, the investigation only has to copy them down to establish intent. ### The fifth winter is being prepared Alleged Russian plans, intercepted by Ukraine, point to an unprecedented bombardment, according to Odarchenko. Suspected stockpiles of ballistic missiles. Jet-powered drones. Many in Moscow see this winter campaign as the best chance to break Ukrainian resistance. The goal: spark a humanitarian crisis and make the major cities unlivable. From October 5 to 11, about 200 strikes hit the power sector, and 17 hit oil and gas. In one week. Two hundred. And Trump, in all this? Trump called for an energy ceasefire, The Kyiv Independent recalls, and it was the right call. Moscow escalated anyway. The Kremlin received an open hand from Washington and filled it with missiles. *Trump asked for a power truce. Moscow answered with winter.* ## Recruits from 29 countries ### The report’s second part The report contains something else. Trafficking. Men from 29 countries, deceived or coerced by agents, were recruited into the Russian army. Twenty-nine countries. The agents posed as legitimate companies, arranged visas and travel, and sometimes escorted the groups. On arrival, a contract. In Russian. Signed fast. Men who came looking for a job end up as soldiers in a war they knew nothing about. The contract bound the recruits to the Russian Defense Ministry, and the commission notes close coordination with the agents. An organized pipeline. ### Here, here and here A woman, 35 years old. Her husband came from the Caribbean. “They took his passport and just told him to sign here, here and here.” “It was only in Russian. He was totally pressured and had no choice.” Here, here, here. Then the front. Dangerous missions. Many died or went missing; others surrendered and received prisoner-of-war status. The Kremlin buys its soldiers abroad, under false contracts, then sends them to the front. Same pattern. Lie first. Exploit next. Human trafficking and organized cold tell the same method: treating lives as equipment. ## What the UN cannot do ### A report does not stop a missile Now, the limit. It is enormous. UN investigators are powerless to stop these strikes, Kateryna Odarchenko states flatly in her analysis. Powerless, truly. A report. Words. Not an interceptor. Ukraine’s air defenses are currently insufficient against the coming onslaught, Odarchenko writes. The commission calls for an end to the attacks and the release of all trafficking victims. Nothing more. Since July, four strikes on warehouses used by the UN have destroyed more than 1.5 million dollars of medicine. Even the UN is hit. Medicine destroyed in a humanitarian warehouse is proof that nothing truly stops this campaign. ### And Ukrainian strikes? An honest question. The commission also examined Ukrainian strikes on energy facilities in Russia and in occupied areas. It could not conclude. The reason? Moscow refused access. And never answered. An accused who shuts the door on investigators cannot then complain about an incomplete report. Moscow’s silence clears nobody; it only takes away Russia’s right to cry injustice. Transparency would have cost little. Moscow chose the shadows. A closed door. A partial report. The responsibility, for its part, stays whole. ## The fifth winter begins ### Møse is worried Erik Møse says it clearly. The attacks have again intensified, and there is serious concern for the life and health of civilians, he warns. A fifth winter. The same targets. Hundreds of thousands of people in Kyiv and front-line regions already face power and water outages. On October 16, the UN was already recording civilian casualties at a record level, UN News recalls. A record. Before winter. A record before the cold announces a winter heavier still than the four before it. The cold has not even started, and the numbers already beat those of previous seasons. ### The law arrives, the heat does not The law has spoken. It has named. It has heated nothing. The report will warm no apartment, but nobody will be able to say they did not know. The generators run. The boilers wait. The elders eye the elevator. A legal word does not replace a boiler, but it fixes responsibility for the day of the trial. That day will come. The names will remain. *The law named the cold. It did not stop it.* Why the UN finally calls Russia’s cold a crime against humanity. How many more frozen nights before a UN word becomes an interceptor? **By Maxime Marquette, columnist** ## Columnist's transparency note ### Editorial stance I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies. I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events. ### Method and sources This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here. **Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies. **Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations. When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**. ### Nature of the analysis The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted. My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors. This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text. ## Sources: ### Primary Sources: - [United Nations Ukraine — Russian authorities committed crimes against humanity through attacks on Ukraine’s energy, October 26, 2026](https://ukraine.un.org/en/325200-russian-authorities-committed-crimes-against-humanity-through-attacks-ukraine%E2%80%99s-energy) - [UN News — Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy amount to crimes against humanity, commission says, October 26, 2026](https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/10/1168670) - [Interfax-Ukraine — UN Commission of Inquiry: Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure amount to crimes against humanity, October 26, 2026](https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/1226289.html) ### Secondary Sources: - [Atlantic Council — Kateryna Odarchenko, UN report: Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid are a crime against humanity, October 27, 2026](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/un-report-russian-attacks-on-ukraines-power-grid-are-a-crime-against-humanity/) - [The Kyiv Independent — Russia’s assault on Ukraine’s energy grid is a war crime, UN says, October 27, 2026](https://kyivindependent.com/russias-assault-on-ukraines-energy-grid-is-a-war-crime-un-says/) - [The Kyiv Independent — Blackout in Konotop enters fourth day with no end in sight, October 27, 2026](https://kyivindependent.com/blackout-in-konotop-enters-fourth-day-with-no-end-in-sight/) --- Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/explainer-why-the-un-finally-calls-russia-s-cold-a-crime-against-humanity