Zelenskyy plans to skip Davos as Russian strikes leave Kyiv dark

Aliaksandr Kudrytski and Olesia Safronova, Bloomberg News on Jan 20, 2026

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he’ll likely scrap plans to attend the World Economic Forum as he oversees the war-battered nation’s response to Russian air strikes that have left vast swathes of Kyiv without heating and water.

Zelenskyy said he needs to be in Kyiv to coordinate the emergency as temperatures in the capital remain well below freezing. He may revive plans to travel to the conference in Davos, Switzerland, if negotiators pressing for Western-backed security guarantees and an end to the four-year war produce an agreement that can be signed, he said.

“So far the plan is on how to help people with energy,” Zelenskyy said in online audio comments to reporters on Tuesday. “I choose Ukraine and not the economic forum, but everything can change at any moment.”

U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators agreed to hold additional talks in Davos during their meetings over the weekend. The Ukrainian president had planned to make the trip to Switzerland potentially to sign deals on guarantees and a plan to revive the country’s economy with the U.S. following the latest flurry of diplomatic efforts.

“For me, it is important to end the war and the plan for prosperity and security guarantees are important,” Zelenskyy said. “The last mile remains to complete these documents — if they are ready and there will be a meeting and a trip, if there are energy packages, or additional air defense packages, I will definitely go.”

Kyiv was reeling from a recent series of Russian drone and missile strikes on Tuesday. The barrage left more than 5,000 of the city’s high-rise residential buildings without heating, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a Telegram post. Kyiv’s eastern districts were also left without water supply, he said.

The central regions of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia as well as the Rivne region in the west were attacked. Neighboring Poland halted operations at the two eastern airports of Lublin and Rzeszow, according to authorities.

State of emergency

The Russian strikes across Ukraine involved a “significant number” of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as 300 attack drones, Zelenskyy said in a post on X earlier Tuesday. He added that Ukraine’s military had received a long-awaited shipment of air-defense missiles on Monday, which “helped significantly.”

In a separate post, the president said that if meetings in Davos “can provide greater protection for real people and real cities and villages in Ukraine, Ukraine will be in Davos.”

“If partners are not ready, all representatives of Ukraine must focus on concrete matters that help our state and our citizens,” he said.

Last week, Zelenskyy imposed a state of emergency on Ukraine’s energy sector, with repair crews working around the clock. But in Kyiv, which faces Russian air raids on a weekly basis, there’s little time to restore disrupted power, water or heating supplies. That situation led Klitschko to urge residents to leave the capital on Jan. 9.

The constant barrage by the Kremlin’s forces are undermining “even the smallest opportunities for dialog” between Kyiv and Moscow, Zelenskyy said in a post on social media over the weekend. He urged U.S. negotiators, who have been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace deal with Vladimir Putin, to understand that a consequence of the Russian president’s continued attacks was the “discrediting of the diplomatic process.”

Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said it was still assessing the results of the overnight attack in the capital.

“We went through three winters, and we will get through this winter. But every winter becomes more difficult for us,” the company’s chief executive officer, Maxim Timchenko, said at a briefing in Davos.