The situation is critical: a building on the left bank of Kyiv has been without heat for nine days.
17 January 22:12
Residents of the building at 14 Shamo Street in the Dniprovsky district of Kyiv (Rusankivka) find themselves in a critical situation. Since January 9, 2026, the first entrance building has been without heating and electricity for nine days. The batteries in one of the apartments may burst, posing a risk of flooding.
This was reported by an RBC-Ukraine correspondent, according to "Komersant Ukrainian".
“People are freezing around the clock.“ The temperature in the apartments is 1-2 degrees Celsius.
Due to the lack of heating, conditions in the apartments on Shamo Street, 14 have become critical. The air temperature in the apartments ranges from 1 to 8 degrees, and in some rooms, it is 1-2 degrees. Such low temperatures pose a direct threat to the health and lives of residents, including children, the elderly, the sick, and people with disabilities, according to the residents of the building.
They are extremely concerned not only about the lack of heat, but also about the inability to get help from the relevant services. The requests that people are submitting en masse to the hotlines 1557, 1551, and other resources are effectively being ignored.
“Requests can be moderated for several days, and in the end, they are simply not accepted. People are freezing around the clock. The responsible services are ignoring the problem,” say the residents of the building.
The cold weather has brought another problem to the building. It turns out that one of the apartments has no windows. Due to the low temperatures, the radiators could burst at any moment and flood the neighbors, says Kateryna, a resident of the building.
“This is the apartment right above me. It has no windows, and because of the cold, there is a risk that the radiators will burst, and then the neighboring apartments will simply be flooded. The water has not been drained, and the temperature is extremely low. Yesterday, I wrote a statement to the housing office, suggesting that perhaps a window could be installed there or it could be covered with plywood. In short, to do something. If the radiators haven’t burst yet, it could happen at any moment. And I live right below that apartment,” she says.
The neighbors found the young woman who owns the apartment.
Kateryna revealed the details of the incident:
“She came to the meeting, and I came with two employees from the housing office. She literally attacked one of the employees, broke the glass on the floor, threatened the woman with a large piece of glass, and ran away. We contacted the police, but they said they didn’t see any evidence of a crime. When the batteries explode, they explode. Maybe it has already happened, we don’t know.”
No one could get into the apartment. According to Kateryna, the head of the housing office, Kateryna Yuriyivna, needs to write a statement to the police about the emergency situation, and then law enforcement agencies could be involved.
“They tell us that the situation is an emergency, but no one is doing anything. She is not writing a statement to the police. I don’t know how to get the housing and utilities company manager to do this. The main thing now is to see if the batteries are broken,” says the woman.
Why batteries can burst at any moment
Radiators in an apartment can burst due to water freezing inside them. When the temperature drops below zero, and especially during frosts, water turns into ice and increases in volume.
There is no free space inside the batteries and pipes for such expansion, so the ice begins to press on the metal walls from the inside. The pressure gradually increases, cracks may appear, radiator sections may rupture, and pipes may be damaged.
Most often, the problem manifests itself when the temperature rises after a cold spell. The ice melts and water begins to leak through the damaged areas, causing flooding in neighboring apartments.
The absence of windows in the apartment means that the room freezes quickly and the temperature inside is almost equal to the street temperature. If the water is not drained from the heating system, the risk of water freezing in the batteries and their rupture becomes very high.
The elevator in one of the buildings has not been working since 2023.
This 17-story building also has problems with elevators. Residents say that each stairwell has two elevators, a freight elevator and a passenger elevator, and extremely inconvenient stairs. They are narrow, without handrails, with steep steps and walls on both sides, so only one person can walk up the stairs at a time, and it is impossible for two people to pass each other or carry large items.
In the first entrance, the freight elevator has not been working since 2023, and the passenger elevator is also often out of order. This situation is extremely difficult for the residents of the building, they say.
“Elderly people, people with disabilities, and people with small children are effectively hostages to the situation, because their ability to leave the building is currently limited or non-existent. When an ambulance is called, doctors refuse to climb such narrow, inconvenient stairs,” complain the neighbors.
They add that if someone needs to be hospitalized, a sick or immobile person will be literally doomed, because the configuration of the stairs makes it impossible to transport such a person on a stretcher or in a wheelchair.
