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“These days we have severe blackouts, sometimes with only 3 3 hours of electricity during daytime with long breaks [in] between. When there is no electricity, there is also no heat or water at home. I am lucky to have only heating and hot water absent during blackouts, but my sister is suffering full scale. The cities have become accustomed to these blackouts. Such is the life we are leading these days,” wrote Yuri Shtanov, a 63-year-old Ukrainian physicist, in November last year. He was writing to his colleague and dear friend, Varun Sahni. 

“This night was a heavy attack on our district again. Another neighbouring house, some 50 metres away, was hit again on the 16th floor, with a number of flats destroyed and people reportedly killed. Power plants were hit again, so there is no water, no heating, and no electricity in the houses. The outside temperature meanwhile is gradually going down, from -8 at present to -11 later today. They promise to restore electricity, but as regards heating, nothing is clear. Last time we did not have it for a couple of days, but the outside temperature at that time was about 0. Now it looks more grave,” he wrote two weeks later in January.

“Things are worse. The power plant that supplied heating to about 1,000 houses was destroyed completely on Feb 3. Now we are without heating all through this winter, only unstable electricity and gas oven at my parents’. We manage to maintain the temperature at our place between 13°-16°C using gas and electric heater. At my home it is 5°C, I only visit it for checks. Many people here are in much worse conditions compared to ours,” he wrote a month after.

In the days leading up to these messages between Yuri and Sahni, data from the US Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) – an experimental setup that helps measure how fast the universe is expanding – confirmed some of the findings........

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