Planning, Not Reacting: Ukraine’s Rescuers and Nova Ukraine Prepare for Winter Side by Side

On the tenth floor of an apartment building on Kyiv’s left bank last January, Svitlana could not bathe her three-year-old daughter, Arina, or cook her a hot meal. After strikes on the energy system, they had gone more than three days without heat or electricity, in temperatures as low as -18°C. So she wrapped Arina in layer after layer and took her down ten floors of a dark stairwell to a heated tent that Ukraine’s State Emergency Service had set up outside. There they could warm up, eat something hot, charge a phone and talk with a psychologist.

Millions of Ukrainian families lived some version of that winter. When the power goes out, heat and water often go with it, elevators stop, and anyone who depends on electricity for medical treatment is suddenly at risk. UNICEF, which documented families like Svitlana’s, observed that darkness and freezing temperatures intensify fear and stress for children.

For the rescuers of the State Emergency Service, known in Ukraine as DSNS, a winter like that changes the job. They still fight fires and search damaged buildings after attacks. But when power, heat, and water fail, they also put up warming tents, install generators, and help residents get through the outages. Last winter left them, and everyone working alongside them, with a plain lesson: the time to prepare for an emergency is before it happens.

Ukraine Is Preparing Earlier This Winter

Preparation for the 2026–2027 heating season started months before the first frost, and for good reason. This will be Ukraine’s fifth heating season since the full-scale invasion, and attacks on the energy system have not stopped.

The Government of Ukraine has made community resilience a strategic priority: protecting critical infrastructure, giving water and heating utilities their own backup power, and building smaller local heating sources to replace large boiler plants. Humanitarian organizations are planning too. The United Nations’ 2026–2027 Winter Response Plan seeks $358.4 million to reach 2.1 million of the most vulnerable people, drawing on what last winter revealed.

No plan can stop every strike or outage. Planning ahead decides how quickly people get help when one comes.

In Vinnytsia, the Risk Is Already Familiar

Vinnytsia lies far from the eastern front, but distance has not kept it out of range. On February 3, 2026, an attack on the region’s critical infrastructure left about 50 communities without electricity and stopped the main water supply station in the city of Vinnytsia. Firefighters worked the strike sites while energy crews began emergency repairs. Later that month, another attack damaged energy facilities and 40 homes.

For DSNS rescuers, days like these show how one event becomes several. A strike starts a fire. The fire takes out power. In freezing weather, a power outage turns into a heating and water emergency for an entire community. A rescue unit that already has the right equipment and can keep operating when the lights go out around it, reaches people sooner.

From Responding to Planning Together

That is why a recent working meeting in Vinnytsia matters more than its size suggests. Nova Ukraine and the Main Directorate of DSNS in the Vinnytsia region sat down to discuss what emergency units need for winter, how to strengthen their energy resilience and which priorities the two organizations should set together for 2027. They also signed a Memorandum of Cooperation.

On paper, it is a short agreement. In practice, it marks a shift from responding to needs as they arise to planning for the next ones together.

The partnership is already producing results. This year, Nova Ukraine has supported Vinnytsia’s emergency responders twice, providing rope rescue equipment and individual first-aid kits.Both deliveries count most in the first minutes after a strike. People can end up trapped on upper floors, below street level or in parts of a building that stairs and standard equipment can’t safely reach. Rope rescue systems give trained teams another way in, so they can secure a person and bring them out while limiting the danger to themselves. First-aid kits cover what comes next: care for the injured until medical teams take over. Rescuers work in dangerous conditions too, and they may need the same kit for a colleague.

The support was shaped around the real needs of emergency responders, and that is the point. A delivery’s worth lies in what it lets a trained team do when someone’s life depends on speed.

Why Planning Ahead Matters

Winter raises the stakes. Equipment identified in the fall doesn’t have to be hunted down during a January emergency. Backup power keeps a station working when the neighborhood around it goes dark. Regular contact lets crews fix small gaps before they become urgent.

Most important, the people setting the priorities are the ones who will use the equipment and answer the calls. Serhiy Porhun, Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service in the Vinnytsia region, noted that the cooperation is already yielding results. Nova Ukraine representative Olga Drozd expressed hope that the partnership will continue to develop and that joint efforts will strengthen rescuers’ capabilities and help ensure they have what they need to do their work effectively.

The memorandum keeps those conversations going beyond a single delivery or a single winter, and both teams are already looking toward 2027.

Prepared Before the Next Call Comes

No one knows where the next attack will land, when the next power line will go down, or which family will need help on the coldest night of the year. What we can decide now is whether the people who respond are ready.

Through this cooperation, rescuers in Vinnytsia can tell Nova Ukraine directly what they need, and the two organizations can plan together, looking past the next delivery to winter readiness, steadier power, and next year’s priorities.

Donors rarely see this part of the work: the meeting where a rescue unit explains what it will need before the cold arrives, or the planning that happens months before equipment reaches a station. But this is where support becomes useful, matched to real needs and in place before anyone has to call for help.

Nova Ukraine’s donors make this work possible. Their support helps turn the lessons of one winter into preparation for the next.

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