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GENEVA: Civilian life on the frontlines in Ukraine is becoming a battle for survival, with attacks on energy infrastructure threatening to spark a major winter crisis, the United Nations warned Friday.
Matthias Schmale, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, said civilians were increasingly bearing the brunt with the approach of the fourth winter since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Schmale said this year had been deadlier for civilians than 2024, with a 30-percent increase in casualties.
Notably, a third of all recorded civilian deaths and injuries in 2025 were caused by drone attacks.
“This is increasingly a technological war: a drone war,” he told reporters in Geneva.
He said increased attacks on frontline areas had seen more than 57,000 evacuees seek aid at transit sites, while markets close to the front lines were becoming “increasingly dysfunctional.”
“Apart from the terror of war, the sirens, the attacks, it’s also increasingly a fight for survival,” with limited access to basic goods, he said.

- Energy attacks -

Schmale voiced concerns for people who were preparing for another winter in frontline cities, warning they could find themselves stuck in high-rise buildings, cut off from water and electricity, due to Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure.
“Destroying energy production and distribution capacity as winter starts clearly impacts the civilian population and is a form of terror,” he said.
If the rate of repairs does not keep pace with the rate of destruction, “that could turn into a major crisis,” he said.
“There is no way that with the available resources we would be able to respond to a major crisis within a crisis.”
The UN’s winter response plan, which aims to provide more than 1.7 million people with aid including heating and cash assistance to help families through the cold months, is just 50 percent funded.

- ‘Protracted war’ -

US President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war have yielded no progress and Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected multiple calls for a ceasefire.
“Our basic planning assumption for 2026 is the war is continuing,” Schmale said, and “we’re sadly, dramatically, in this for the longer haul.”
“This feels increasingly like this is a protracted war,” he said.
“Right now on the ground it doesn’t feel at all like it’s ending any time soon.”
Schmale said he was “amazed by the resilience of people,” but warned: “let’s not romanticize resilience,” with civilians growing increasingly conflict-weary.
“The mental health impact of this war is increasing,” he said, fearing that Ukraine will have to “deal with that for at least a generation, if not several.”

GOMA, DR Congo: The M23 armed group, which controls large parts of eastern DR Congo, on Friday described a call by the French president to reopen Goma airport as “inopportune.”
President Emmanuel Macron said the key airport would open “in the coming weeks” for humanitarian flights, during an international conference on Thursday on the crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The region — bordering Rwanda with abundant natural resources but plagued by non-state armed groups — has suffered extreme violence for more than three decades.
The crisis intensified with the 2021 resurgence of the M23 — a Rwandan-backed armed group fighting the Kinshasa authorities — and came to a head early this year when the militia seized the key cities of Goma and Bukavu.
Goma airport was the scene of fierce fighting during the city’s capture in January and has since remained closed.
The M23, which was not invited to the Paris conference on supporting peace and prosperity in the Great Lakes region, “considers inopportune France’s call for the reopening” of Goma airport, spokesman Lawrence Kanyuka said in a statement.
“Such an initiative must only be undertaken within the framework of negotiations currently under way in Doha under Qatari mediation,” he added.
The Congolese government and the M23 signed a declaration of principles on July 19 in Qatar that included a “permanent ceasefire” aimed at halting the conflict.
It followed a separate US-brokered peace deal between the Congolese and Rwandan governments signed in Washington in June.
However, efforts to end the conflict have proved slow to take effect on the ground.
Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe has also expressed doubts.
“Paris cannot reopen an airport, as the primary stakeholders are absent,” he said on Thursday, referring to the M23 group.
Humanitarian officials have voiced doubts, too, about a possible reopening and underlined that the land route remains essential for delivering aid to areas under M23 control.
The M23 said in its statement that there was “no longer a humanitarian emergency” in areas under its control.
After seizing Goma, the M23 ordered displaced people living on the outskirts of the city to return home and in a few days emptied makeshift camps where hundreds of thousands had been living in dire conditions.
The Paris conference raised more than 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) in international aid for the region, Macron announced.