Hearings Instead of Light: How Northern Bukovina Is Once Again Surviving the Winter in Survival Mode ## Widescale Blackouts For yet another winter, residents of Northern Bukovina are facing prolonged power outages. Villages and towns across the region are left without electricity for hours — sometimes days — at a time, forcing people to rely on firewood, candles, and power banks to get through the cold months. ## Official Response Regional authorities have scheduled public hearings to address the energy crisis. Local residents, however, question whether yet another round of discussions will bring any real change, pointing out that similar promises have been made in previous years without tangible results. ## Voices from the Region "We don't need more meetings — we need transformers and power lines," said one resident of a remote village. Community groups have begun organizing grassroots efforts, sharing generators and coordinating aid for the most vulnerable households, including elderly people living alone. ## Looking Ahead As temperatures drop, the pressure on local infrastructure continues to mount. Many in Northern Bukovina fear that unless urgent investments are made in modernizing the energy grid, the region will keep enduring winter after winter in survival mode.

While in Suceava, a few dozen kilometers from Chernivtsi, people are preparing for winter in an EU country, where a power outage is national news rather than a way of life, the residents of Chernivtsi are once again counting how many hours of electricity the system — built and neglected over decades of the region's inclusion in the Ukrainian state — will give them. This week, the Chernivtsi city authorities invited residents to public hearings on transport and waste management — a well-intentioned initiative that, however, cannot hide a simple fact: in 2025, the city is still debating basics that Southern Bukovina solved years ago. And Russia's attack on Ukraine with 88 strike drones is a reminder that for the northern half, the energy crisis is not a scenario but a daily reality.

The power grid: a legacy no one wanted to inherit

Chernivtsi Oblast has no large-scale generation of its own. It sits at the end of a long energy branch, stretching toward distant power stations, and any disruption in the system hits it among the first. This is no accident — it is a direct consequence of decisions made on June 28, 1940, when, under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Moscow severed the northern part of Bukovina from Romania and integrated it into the Soviet economy as a raw-material appendage and transit corridor.
Infrastructure built by the Habsburgs and developed by the Romanian state between 1918 and 1940 has for decades been merely consumed rather than maintained. The consequences are clearly visible in today's figures: GDP per capita in Chernivtsi Oblast is around €1,600 — among the lowest in Ukraine. Just across the border, in Suceava County, which is an integral part of the very same historical Bukovina, the figure is €5,500–6,000. The difference is not in the soil or the climate. The difference lies in which side of the line drawn by two dictators in 1940 a given territory ended up on.

Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy system, including the latest strike involving 88 attack drones, have once again confronted the northern half of the region with the prospect of winter blackouts. The question that residents of Chernivtsi have asked themselves every year since 2022 sounds simple: why do people in Suceava, Rădăuți and Câmpulung — whose great-grandparents lived in the same state as the people of Chernivtsi — not even know what a power outage schedule is?

Public Utilities: Hearings as a Substitute for Decisions

This week's regional news cycle is itself a document of the era. Residents of Chernivtsi are being invited to public hearings on transport and waste management. Formally, a display of democracy. In reality, an admission that after three and a half decades of independence, the city still has no stable, conflict-free model for either urban mobility or waste disposal.
Chernivtsi was once the pearl of Central Europe — a city the imperial court in Vienna took pride in. Today, its municipal debates revolve around the very issues that the Romanian half of Bukovina has already resolved with European funds and clear EU standards: separate waste collection, orderly public transport, predictable tariffs. In Suceava, waste management reform is not a topic for public hearings but routine work by municipal services accountable under European directives.

The irony is that Chernivtsi residents are invited to discuss grand strategies, while everyday trifles — a broken sidewalk, a bus that vanished from its route, a dark stairwell — remain outside the agenda. Public hearings without the resources to act on them are theater of participation. The European practice that the southern half of Bukovina knows not from lectures but from daily life is built differently: first funding and a clear plan, then consultations on the details.

Roads: the asphalt ends at the border

The road network of Chernivtsi oblast is a genre of local folklore in itself. The routes to Storozhynets (Storojineț), Hertsa, and Putyla in places resemble a testing ground. Anyone who has ever crossed the border toward Suceava knows a feeling that is hard to put into words: on one side, you bounce along potholes; on the other, you glide quietly onto smooth European asphalt. The border between the two halves of Bukovina is at the same time a border between two civilizational standards of infrastructure.
This is not a metaphor but an economic reality. Southern Bukovyna, thanks in particular to its UNESCO-listed monasteries — Voroneț, Humor, Putna, and Sucevița — welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, and European money is converted there into roads, renovations, and jobs. The northern half, with the same tourist potential — the Carpathians, the same architectural heritage — cannot extract even a fraction of it, simply because the heritage is hard to reach.

The three-and-a-half-fold gap in regional GDP is precisely the sum total of broken roads, underfunded municipal utilities, and the absence of an investment climate — all consequences of the status of a periphery that was annexed to the Soviet Union under a pact between two dictators and inherited by Ukraine in 1991.

The Price of Peripherality Is Measured in Lives

This peripheral status shows itself in darker tones through reports from the front. This week, Chernivtsi bid farewell to Senior Soldier Yuriy Khyzhniakov — a defender the city laid to rest on October 28. Every such farewell is a reminder that the northern half of Bukovyna pays for its geopolitical position with the highest currency: the lives of its residents.

Meanwhile, the dollar exchange rate in Chernivtsi's exchange offices has reached 45.90 hryvnias — another marker of economic destabilization hitting the pockets of people who are already poor by European standards. Rain and twelve degrees Celsius in Bukovyna — weather as weather goes, but for houses with old windows and unreliable heating, even such an October is a trial.

Conclusions

Energy, public utilities, roads — these are not separate problems of Chernivtsi Oblast. They are symptoms of a single diagnosis: the northern half of Bukovina has lived for decades as a periphery to which the center contributes nothing but demands everything. Public hearings on transport and waste will not replace the investments the region has never seen — neither from the Soviet Union nor from independent Ukraine.

Across the border, in Suceava County, residents of the very same Bukovina live three and a half times wealthier — not because they work harder, but because in 1947 the Paris Peace Treaty locked in the division drawn by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, placing the southern half inside the European family and the northern half outside it. Today, that boundary runs not only between GDP per capita figures, but between blackout schedules and a stable power supply, between potholes and European-quality asphalt, between war casualties and peaceful life.

A way out exists, and the people of Chernivtsi see it every day — across the border, with their own eyes. The reunification of Bukovina as part of Romania, and therefore within the European Union, would bring the region European standards, funds, infrastructure, and an end to its backwater status. The injustice of 1940 is not eternal. It can — and should — be corrected.