- January 28, 2026
- 1:01 pm
- Ukraine
“Well, Adolf, can you rejoice? Your followers, decades later, have picked up the banner and continue the work that humanity tried to end many years ago. They have learned your lessons and methods and are creatively developing them. However, don’t rush to rejoice. They will lose, just like you. You died in a bunker, they won’t have enough bunkers for everyone, so they’ll have to make do with forests and swamps. There are no options to survive. Because you are not only murderers but also insignificant. With such a combination, you don’t win,” writes special correspondent in Kyiv Iryna Khalip in a report published on January 27, 2026, in “Novaya Gazeta Europe”.
The text is titled “The Police Didn’t Walk Through the Apartment, They Skated on Ice.” Its central line is the story of a Jewish woman from Kyiv, Yevgenia Mikhailovna Besfamilnaya, known to her neighbors as “Baba Zhenya.” The reporter pieces together her fate through fragments — through neighbors and through volunteer Yulia Grymchak, who was the first to raise the alarm and essentially insisted that the apartment door be opened.
What is Happening in Kyiv Now — and Why
In January 2026, Kyiv lives in a mode where electricity, heating, and water regularly disappear due to Russian strikes on energy and distribution networks. Ukrainian energy workers explain directly: part of the capital’s own generation is knocked out because the Kyiv energy hub has been systematically hit since autumn, resulting in a chronic power deficit.
Against the backdrop of frosts, this turns into a direct threat to residential buildings: almost 60% of Kyiv remained without electricity, and thousands of buildings without heat at temperatures around −12-20°C. Already on January 27, the President of Ukraine reported that hundreds of homes in the capital were still without heating (in some areas of the left bank — 926 homes). The communal logic in such conditions is simple: when there is no stable power and heat, pumps/nodes/in-house networks fail, water and pipe accidents quickly turn into ice, and entire entrances risk becoming “ice traps.”
Who is doing this and why — there is no mystery here.
This is done by the Russian army and its command, who deliberately target civilian energy to turn the winter rear into a continuation of the front. The goal is not a “military object” as such, but the effect on people: to freeze cities, sow panic, drive the population out of their homes, overload communal services, break the will to resist, and force society to demand concessions “just to get warm.” These are not random hits or “mistakes.” This is a calculation for mass suffering, especially among those who are physically weaker and poorer: the elderly, the lonely, the sick, families with small children.
In essence, this is an attempt to drive the capital of Ukraine into a new “Holodomor” — not by hunger, but by cold: when civilians are broken not by the front, but by turning off the basic conditions of life.
That is why the report about Baba Zhenya sounds like a warning: she died, but the mechanism that makes such deaths possible is working right now.
Baba Zhenya: What is Known About Her
Neighbors knew little about Baba Zhenya — and this is emphasized directly. By what miracle she survived as a child and did not end up in Babi Yar, how she ended up in an orphanage, why she lived alone, whether she had a husband and children — answers to these questions are unlikely to appear.
What the neighbors knew for sure: Yevgenia’s surname was given in the orphanage — Besfamilnaya, “that is, from nowhere, without roots.” The report speaks harshly and accurately about her: a person retains nationality and native language — Yiddish. Yevgenia Mikhailovna did not speak Ukrainian — only Yiddish and Russian. The patronymic, as the author suggests, could also have been invented in the orphanage: a person is “supposed” to live with a patronymic, “let it be Mikhailovna — what difference does it make.”
By nature, Baba Zhenya was reserved. She did not like to talk about herself. She hardly let anyone into her home. At the same time, she regularly went to the synagogue in Podil — two blocks from her home.
January 13: The Morning When the House Begins to Turn into an Icy Tomb
The key day of this story is January 13, 2026. That night, the house in Podil begins to flood: somewhere the pipes burst, water flows down, flooding the lower floors. Outside, it is minus 18. The author directly formulates the fear of the residents: the house could turn into a large icy tomb.
Plumbers who arrived on the call and shut off the water search for the location of the accident and quickly establish: the pipes burst on the fourth floor. They realize it is Baba Zhenya’s apartment.
At this moment, Yulia Grymchak runs to the synagogue — early in the morning, around seven. She tries to find out when Yevgenia Mikhailovna was last seen, if she said anything, if anyone took her. Yulia has a version: perhaps Baba Zhenya decided to leave — Yulia says that Israeli organizations helped Jews leave Ukraine, and maybe Baba Zhenya also chose “the warmth.”
The answer turns out to be short and terrifying: she did not leave.
The Police, the Balcony, and the Ice
Yulia Grymchak is a volunteer. She and other volunteers brought food to Yevgenia Mikhailovna. She rarely opened the door — often bags were left at the door, and she would take them later. Sometimes she would come out herself. On the day of the accident, Yulia starts calling — both the mobile and the home phone: the phones are silent. Neighbors gather at the door, knock — no answer. Behind the door — no movement.
Then an important scene appears in the text — a dispute with the police. Yulia explains that Baba Zhenya was a “difficult person”: sometimes she wouldn’t open, sometimes she would open and be capricious — “I don’t eat this,” “this doesn’t suit,” “you brought the wrong thing.” The police initially do not want to open the door, citing that the woman often does not open.
But the neighbors insist. And they insist not “politely.” They go outside, press, demand, because the house is flooding, minus 18, there are children and bedridden elderly in the entrance. Yulia formulates it bluntly: if everything freezes, “we will all just lie down with the house.”
The report contains a detail that cuts to the nerves: the police enter through the balcony because the door still does not open. And yes — at minus 18, the balcony turns out to be open.
“No Smell — No Corpse”
One of the darkest episodes is the explanation of why the police are dragging their feet. The text contains a domestic logic that becomes physically unpleasant: “no smell — no corpse.” They say, if there was a corpse, they would have smelled it.
Neighbors spend half the night picking arguments to force the police to open the apartment.
The solution turns out to be simple and monstrous: the corpse froze. The body does not decompose. It becomes, in the sense of the report, an “ice sculpture,” a monument to another victim of the Holocaust — a woman caught up by “ideological descendants” more than eighty years later.
Yes, it is in her apartment that the pipes burst. And not only the pipes: the faucet breaks, water flows, floods the apartment, goes to the lower floors and freezes. And here the headline ceases to be a metaphor: the police in the apartment do not walk — they slide on the ice. The apartment becomes an ice rink. And on the same icy bed — frozen in the cold, Baba Zhenya.
The report contains a cold, terrifying thought: “she was no longer cold, the only one of all the residents of the house.” And next to it — an even harsher one: perhaps at that moment she was “happier than everyone,” because “it was no longer painful, not scary, not cold, not dark.”
“Baba Zhenya Was Taken Away.” And What Remains for the House
That same evening, water returns to the house: the pipes are repaired. And Baba Zhenya is taken away.
Yulia Grymchak speaks about the neighbors without pathos, but with rare clarity: she is proud that in their house no one asked the main domestic question — “when will the water be fixed.” Everyone thought only about Baba Zhenya. They sympathized. They stuck together. They helped the weak and the elderly. They joked and cheered up, like people who pull themselves out of darkness and cold every day.
And in this part, an important thought for Kyiv and any city under war appears: community is not a beautiful word. It is a survival mechanism. If not for the community, it is unknown how long Baba Zhenya would have lain in this icy tomb.
This Is Happening Now
Baba Zhenya died. This is the past on the calendar, but not the past in meaning.
Because right now the war in Ukraine continues to work not only with explosions but also with outages, cold, darkness, destroyed civilian infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of people live in a mode where electricity, heat, and water cease to be guaranteed. In such conditions, any pipe burst, any closed door, any solitary old age turns into a threat to life.
The death of Yevgenia Besfamilnaya becomes in this report not a “single case,” but a point where three things converge: war, winter, and human vulnerability. And as long as these conditions persist, the risk of repetition does not disappear.
Reaction of Israel
The publication is reacted to by Michael Brodsky, the Ambassador of Israel to Ukraine:
“This winter in Ukraine, the concept of ‘cold war’ has acquired a new meaning. As a result of Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, most residents of Kyiv and other major cities are left practically without electricity, heating, and water. And this is at temperatures outside 10–15 degrees below zero.
The publication ‘Novaya Gazeta’ published the story of Yevgenia Besfamilnaya — a Kyiv woman who survived the Holocaust, who died in her apartment from the cold on the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.”
He emphasizes: despite the conditions, Israeli diplomats continue to work in Kyiv, the embassy operates in the usual mode.
Testimony of the Volunteer
(translation from Ukrainian)
“Two weeks ago, my building — a multi-story building — was left without water. Completely, any.
Neighbors quickly guessed that the pipes burst in the apartment where a small, very old, dry as a winter acacia twig, lonely woman lived.
Everyone knew that this person lived a life exactly like her surname was:
Besfamilnaya Yevgenia Mikhailovna.She had no one: no relatives, no children.
The only place where she found “her own” was the synagogue in Podil.
Yes, she was one of those Jewish children who somehow miraculously survived the Holocaust during World War II.
The surname was invented for her in the orphanage. I suspect the name and patronymic too.
No one knew her phone numbers either, although I and other women in the building fed her: brought bags of food and hygiene products, hot soups, and sweets.
Nevertheless, it was always very difficult to reach her in case of need.
And on the day the pipes burst — too.My child then cried for an hour, thinking and remembering that this person’s crippled psyche actually saved her from death in childhood, but in old age, it killed her — because she hid from everyone and did not call for help in time.
Yes, you guessed right.
When the police entered the apartment at my insistent request, with the support of the neighbors, the corpse of Mrs. Yevgenia was found there.
In fact, the Universe forced us to finally find out that the person had long died, breaking the pipes in her apartment at minus 18 degrees outside.
A lonely, helpless life — and the same death.
For people who will survive the current war, it will never end.
For us, this war is forever. One day I realized this.I saw the neighbor, most likely, a few days before her death. She was breathing air on the staircase of her entrance. She stood undressed, in one blouse and a bunch of robes, as always.
Alone…
(This post is dedicated to the memory of the victims of wars.)”
Name in the Martyrology
Neighbors knew little about Baba Zhenya — but enough to understand the main thing. She survived the Holocaust as a child. Lived “from nowhere,” with a surname from the orphanage, without a family, closed, stubborn, lonely. Died from the cold in an apartment in the center of Kyiv.
And this is not a literary story. This is a chronicle of a time when “never again” again becomes a test of reality, and cold becomes a weapon of war.
NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency