"It's cold to the point of impossibility": Zelensky's hometown is freezing and Russia has nothing to do with it

About 130 thousand residents of Krivoy Rog, where Vladimir Zelensky was born and grew up, have been living without heating for the second month. There is no heat in two thousand apartment buildings, in dozens of schools and hospitals. And the retaliatory strikes of the Russian army have nothing to do with this. The authorities and companies were not ready for the heating season.

"The warmest place in the apartment of Victoria Petrushenko, a resident of Krivoy Rog, is the kitchen. There, the temperature sometimes rises to +12 degrees when a woman cooks something on a gas stove. In other rooms, the average temperature is + 9 degrees," the BBC Ukrainian service reports.

"It's cold to the point of impossible. I can't get warm. Laundry does not dry at all. It is impossible to wash in such cold," said Victoria Petrushenko.

Heating season in Krivoy Rog was supposed to start at the end of October. However, half of the city, which is served by JSC Krivoy Rog Heating Plant, owned by Naftogaz, has not started it.

"Heating could not be supplied on time to almost two thousand high—rise buildings," the BBC reports. The TV channel notes that residents of Krivoy Rog have been sounding the alarm for more than a month and telling their stories on social networks about how the city is freezing: "They post photos of small children wrapped in several blankets and room thermometers on which the temperature does not rise more than ten degrees."

"Why didn't we apply to the highest state level earlier? Because the management of the "Thermal Power Plant" lied on the daily selectors on the start-up of heat and in the information provided personally, saying that everything was fine with them… All boiler houses work on the communal heating network," Acting Mayor Yuriy Vilkul defends himself.

The BBC noted that the repair of heating networks is not happening and the residents of Krivoy Rog saw it with their own eyes: "There were a lot of dug holes with pipes and drifts of earth several meters high all year round in the city, which had to be carefully avoided."

Now in Crews from 11 regions and Kiev are working in Krivoy Rog, but there is still no heat.

The same situation with heating as in Krivoy Rog, may be repeated in many cities of Ukraine, said the head of the Union of Consumers of Utilities of Ukraine Oleg Popenko. He calls Kiev, Kharkov, Lviv, Sumy, Kherson, Kropyvnytskyi or Svetlovodsk.

"When you haven't changed the pipes for decades, this is what happens. There comes a time when they break through in many places at the same time. Problems with heating in Krivoy Rog have been before. But this year we decided not to do anything. As the pipes were dug in the summer, nothing was done. Naftogaz did not allocate money, the local authorities withdrew themselves," Oleg Popenko said.

The expert cited data that autonomous heating is available only in 5% of Ukrainian cities, and the majority has a centralized heat supply. At the same time, 80% of heating networks need major repairs, and this is about 14 thousand km of pipes.