Stay or leave? Ukrainians face a hard choice ahead of what could be the war’s toughest winter

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Matvii Yermolenko is 2, but he already knows the words for siren and air defense. This winter, his mother decided to take him out of Kyiv.

“There is sadness, but even stronger is the understanding of what I have to do — leave,” Matvii’s mother, Kateryna Tsvihun, said, adding that they will come back in spring. “I cannot live without Kyiv and Ukraine. I am rooted here, my child is Ukrainian, and my husband is fighting for this.”

Ukrainians are bracing for what many expect to be the hardest winter of the war. Last year, heating disruptions left thousands of people in freezing apartments in Kyiv. Now, officials and analysts say, the badly damaged energy system is increasingly struggling to withstand attacks, putting the country’s resilience to another test. With no end to the war in sight, many people are thinking only about getting through the coming months.

Kyiv is already under strain. Since Aug. 22, not a single day has passed in the capital without an air raid threat, often followed by drone attacks during the day and missiles at night. Some residents have moved to other parts of the country or abroad for the winter. While it's impossible to calculate how many people left the capital, changes in the rental market offer a possible clue.

“In September, we saw that the number of flats available to rent was increasing in Kyiv, whilst it was decreasing in a number of western cities," Liudmyla Kiriukhina, the head of the statistics department at LUN, a Ukrainian real estate platform, said. “This could have indicated that tenants were moving from the capital to the west of the country.”

Exploiting its advantage in jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles, Russia has expanded its targets in the city to include gas stations, data centers, warehouses, big-box stores and bridges that are crucial for civilian transport in a city divided by the Dnieper River. Electricity disruptions have caused problems on the subway, Kyiv’s main transport artery, while water supply issues are increasingly common. Some residents have also criticized local authorities' winter preparations.

But leaving costs money, and many more are staying, stocking up on power banks, water containers and portable gas stoves.

Kateryna Tsvihun, 41, found last winter very difficult. She could not bear the thought of her son going through more power outages, let alone possibly losing heating as well. So she told her husband, a soldier since 2022, that she wanted to spend this winter elsewhere.

She could not find a suitable option in Ukraine, but a Facebook group for mothers who like to travel led her to one in Albania.

“The birth of a child is the ultimate game-changer,” she said. “Before, no matter how scared I was, I stayed in Kyiv and did not even think about leaving.”

Russia recently struck an area near a subway station where she and Matvii often go for walks. “It’s a bit scary to stay,” she said. “But it’s still our home, so we will come back this spring.”

She gave her portable power station, power banks and rechargeable lamps to relatives staying in the capital. For the trip, she bought a large, light-blue suitcase, packing only with practical things and a few of Matvii’s small toys.

“I see it as an opportunity to exhale, because the tiredness and pressure have been piling up over these years of war, the lonely waiting for my husband, and the attacks,” she said.

Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said Wednesday that Russia had continued to attack power generation facilities and substations. “Attacks on the energy sector are not stopping,” it said in a statement.

“The situation in Kyiv is especially difficult right now: People and businesses are facing many hours of electricity and water outages,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Repeated strikes and constant air raid alerts are making repairs take much longer, he said.

“This winter could be just as hard, or even harder than the last one,” Andrii Tkachov, acting head of the Kyiv City Military Administration, said. “The enemy will keep striking critical infrastructure and trying to disrupt residents’ heating and water supply.”

He said Russia's aim is to create a crisis and humanitarian and social tensions in the capital, Ukraine's most populous city and the seat of its main state institutions.

“The enemy understands that attacks on Kyiv will affect the morale of the entire country. The main goal is to break Kyiv,” Tkachov said. “But, as we say, Kyiv rests on three pillars: air defense, our utility and energy workers, and the self-organization of its residents.”

As of Nov. 1, the number of active rental listings in Kyiv had risen by 87% compared with Aug. 1, according to LUN. In September, the number of flats offered for rent during the month rose in Kyiv but fell in several western cities, including Uzhhorod, Lviv, Chernivtsi and Ivano-Frankivsk. According to LUN, this could point to tenants moving west from the capital, but more time was needed to study the changes.

Kateryna Tymoshenko, 39, brought her two children to an Oct. 17 rally demanding the resignation of Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko. Civic groups, activists and veterans organized the protest, accusing city authorities of poor winter preparation, a shortage of shelters, corruption and misuse of budget funds. Klitschko has called the criticism and the rally part of a campaign to discredit him.

“His direct call was to leave. … I don’t have the money to leave,” Tymoshenko said in response to the mayor’s call earlier in October.

She considered moving to central or western Ukraine, but high demand has driven up prices, and she could not find affordable housing. Her husband is also at the front, so the winter preparations fell on her shoulders.

“I expect it to be worse than it was, precisely because of the psychological state,” she said. “I hope there will at least be heating and sewage.” Otherwise, she said, even people like her ready for harsh conditions would consider leaving.

Tymoshenko has power banks, and the family has already moved to a first-floor apartment.

“Everything depends on our partners,” she said. “Despite the resilience of our people, I am ready to endure for as long as possible. But we have no money, we have no weapons, we have no Patriots (anti-missile batteries). So we are forced to explain, to beg, to plead.”

“Well, this is the life we have,” she said. “We didn’t choose it.”

A photo strip of Kateryna Tsvihun, 41, and her husband, Serhii Yermolenko, is displayed on a shelf in their apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Kateryna Tsvihun, 41, gathers children's clothes in her apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Andrii Tymoshenko, left, and Polina Tymoshenko stack wooden blocks on the floor by the light of Polina's headlamp during a blackout caused by Russian strikes on energy infrastructure in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Nov. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Dan Bashakov)

Kateryna Tymoshenko, 39, with her son Andrii walk towards a Dnipro river in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Matvii Yermolenko, 2, sits in an open suitcase as his mother, Kateryna Tsvihun, 41, gathers children's clothes in their apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Democratic nominee Scott Colom defeated Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday in Mississippi's closely contested U.S. Senate race after a prolonged ballot counting process, giving the state its first Black U.S. senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Colom's narrow victory is a seismic shift in Mississippi, which has been controlled mostly by white conservatives for generations despite having the largest share of Black residents of any U.S. state. The outcome adds to a decisive midterm rebuke of President Donald Trump, whose party suffered defeats in several Republican-controlled states, and it will bolster some Democrats' argument that their future runs through the American South.

“All I did was have the courage to imagine a night like this,” Colom told a crowd of hundreds who gathered at Tougaloo College for his victory party. “I had the courage to believe in Mississippi. I had the courage to understand that we can show the country that Mississippi matters.”

The Associated Press called the race in Colom's favor after local officials spent several days processing absentee and provisional ballots, called affidavit ballots in Mississippi.

The last time Mississippi chose a new Democratic senator was 1947; the winner was a staunch segregationist. Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor, capitalized on the state's large Black population, discontent with the economy and Hyde-Smith’s missteps as she sought a second full term.

“They actually deserve a senator that will listen to them, that actually cares about what they think, actually cares about what they’re going through,” Colom said in the campaign's closing stretch.

Hyde-Smith, 67, called Colom late Wednesday afternoon to concede and released a concession speech online shortly afterward.

“While this is not the outcome we worked for or hoped for, I respect the decision of Mississippi voters,” Hyde-Smith said. “I want to congratulate Scott Colom and wish him well as he takes on the tremendous responsibility of representing our great state.”

Colom said during the campaign that he could represent all of Mississippi, a state where racial divisions have long defined its politics and society, and he repeated that pledge after his victory.

“My commitment to you, each and every one of you, is that first I’m going to treat your children like I want my children to be treated,” Colom said. “I’m going to treat your parents the way I want my parents to be treated. I’m gonna treat your future the way I want my future to be” and “work to make every Mississippian’s life better.”

Party leaders hailed the senator-elect's triumph, with nods to the South's emerging status as a political battleground after other victories from North Carolina and South Carolina to Georgia and Texas.

“Scott ran the campaign of a lifetime and re-imagined what’s possible for Democrats in the South,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer of New York posted online.

Former President Bill Clinton, a native Arkansan who campaigned with Colom days before the election, addressed the senator-elect on social media, saying he won “because you believe in the promise of your state’s people. And they believed in you right back.”

Vera Finley was among those supporters.

“I am here to celebrate my parents and my grandparents. I am not one generation out of the cotton fields,” Finley said ahead of Colom's victory speech. “Both of my parents picked cotton. And my great-grandmother was sold here as a slave from Virginia to here. So I am so excited to be on this side of history.”

Another Mississippian, NAACP President Derrick Johnson, issued a statement saying the state’s voters, most notably Black voters, “made history because they refused to be intimidated, discouraged, or counted out” in a state that has seen “some of the nation’s most difficult battles for voting rights.”

The contest was a latecomer to the national spotlight, finally drawing attention and money months after Black senators, including Georgia's Raphael Warnock and Maryland's Angela Alsobrooks, first urged donors and party leaders to see it as winnable.

The son of a onetime Republican who worked for President Ronald Reagan, Colom produced one of the year’s most widely circulated ads. After Hyde-Smith seemed to brush off high beef prices by saying consumers could choose other proteins, Colom cut a 30-second spot depicting incredulous voters saying they’d “pick another senator instead.”

When Trump came to Corinth, Mississippi, in late October to rally with Hyde-Smith, Colom walked the line of Trump supporters as they waited to enter. He introduced himself and asked about their concerns.

Later, when Trump called Hyde-Smith to the stage, she said only nine words in six seconds before stepping away: “Is this not the best president in our lifetime?”

Colom's appearance outside the rally tracked his strategy of criticizing Trump’s policies — especially the Iran war that drove up gas prices and tariffs that caused headaches for Mississippi farmers — without taking personal jabs at the president or people who voted for him. Instead, he consistently put the onus on Hyde-Smith, framing her as a nonentity in Washington — a critique that resonated in a state accustomed to long-serving, powerful senators.

There is some irony in Hyde-Smith losing to Colom. In 2022, President Joe Biden nominated Colom to be a U.S. District Court judge. Mississippi’s senior Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and former Gov. Haley Barbour, who is also a former national Republican chairman, backed the nomination.

Hyde-Smith, however, blocked Colom’s confirmation. Colom said his campaign was never about getting even with Hyde-Smith.

The senator-elect concluded his campaign with an ad that featured him at the Jackson home of Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who, in 1963, was gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist.

Colom told the story of Evers' military service at Normandy in World War II, his voter registration efforts in Mississippi, his assassination and the three decades it took to win a conviction. “He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” Colom said. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”

At the lectern Wednesday night, Colom said it was appropriate that the race be called on Veterans Day, as he again paid tribute to Evers.

“He served his country, came home to Mississippi, and they wouldn’t let him vote,” Colom said. “But he had faith that Mississippi could make progress."

Because of the Black population and its alignment with Democrats, Mississippi’s general elections have been closer for years than its Southern neighbors. Trump won by double digits in each of his three presidential contests, but in 2023, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves managed to win reelection by a margin of just 3 percentage points.

Colom and other Black party leaders and strategists insisted throughout 2026 that he could narrow the gap with strong Black turnout, Republican discontent and an uptick in Democrats' usual share of the white vote in Mississippi.

Results showed strong turnout in the Mississippi Delta and its concentration of majority Black counties. But nearly all of the state moved leftward from the 2024 election, when Trump carried Mississippi by nearly 23 points.

Hyde-Smith was appointed to the Senate in 2018. She won a special election runoff in 2018 and a full term in 2020. Both times she defeated Democrat Mike Espy, a former U.S. agriculture secretary who'd also been Mississippi's first Black congressman since Reconstruction.

During the extended vote count, Colom acknowledged the historic nature of his candidacy but said he cares more about what it means for others.

“My job is to do well enough as the next United States senator that the next time some young Black boy or girl has the work ethic, the vision and the values,” he said, “and they want to be United States senator, that nobody says because of anything I’ve done that they shouldn’t get a chance.”

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Barrow reported from Atlanta and Washington.

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom, his wife Nadia Colom, and daughter's Gwendolyn Lucille Colom and Brooklyn Madison Colom, attend an election event in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

People use their phones as they attend an election event for Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom gestures at an election event in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Attendees cheer during an election event for Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

An attendee cheers during an election event for Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

An attendee reacts during an election event for Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Members of the Hinds County Resolution Board process absentee ballots for a final count, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, at the Hinds County Election Commission in Jackson, Miss., as the U.S. Senate race between Democratic candidate Scott Colom and the incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith remains uncalled. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Members of the Hinds County Resolution Board count absentee ballots for a final count, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026, at the Hinds County Election Commission in Jackson, Miss., as the U.S. Senate race between Democratic candidate Scott Colom and the incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith remains uncalled. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom speaks with staff at his campaign office in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom talks on the phone at his campaign office in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., walks to join members of the Republican Conference to elect their leadership following the sweeping victory by Democrats in the midterm elections, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom talks on the phone with Sen. Cory Booker, in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom talks on the phone with Sen. Cory Booker, in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Scott Colom speaks during a news conference, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, at the Hinds County Sheriff's Office in Jackson, Miss.(AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)

Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Scott Colom speaks during a news conference, Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026, at the Hinds County Sheriff's Office in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt)