Speaking over Zoom from Kyiv on a sub-zero morning, Yuriy Matsyk describes Ukraine's battle to stay online.
"In this war, you can survive without water, heat and comfort, but you cannot survive without electricity and communication."
Without internet or mobile network connectivity, people have no way of finding out if loved ones have survived, said Mr Matsyk, the director of fixed broadband in the country's Ministry of Digital Transformation.
"Where do the rockets hit this time, who died? With all these horrors, a person is saved by communication."
Ukraine's access to the internet is under attack as Russian rocket strikes target the country's energy and communications infrastructure.
It's a situation that's almost unprecedented; a highly online population is having the internet violently pulled from its hands.
They're fighting back with death-defying repair crews and truckloads of generators and satellite internet.
"Can you imagine our life today without the internet?" Mr Matsyk said.
"Especially when it's not by your own decision, [but] against your will you're forced to be without it."
Connectivity unstable and in decline
The impact of each Russian rocket strike against Ukraine can be measured on the far side of the world.
At the Monash University IP Observatory in Melbourne, the destruction of infrastructure is recorded in cold numbers.
These figures are a measure of "connectivity", or the number of internet-connected devices (as a percentage of a baseline figure) in a specific region.
A jagged fall represents residential and business internet-connected devices being taken offline as communication lines are severed or the power goes down.
When the line staggers upwards, Ukraine's defenders have managed to patch the network back together.
In the first phase of the war, Ukraine's internet connectivity dropped about 20 per cent, said Simon Angus, director of the IP Observatory.
"Then there was a kind of a status quo up until October," he said.
Since October, when Russia changed its tactics to target civilians and their infrastructure, internet connectivity has become far more unstable.
Several times, it's dropped below 50 per cent, measured at the national level.
"[This] means that certain locations must have had almost a complete loss of electricity or internet connection," Dr Angus said.
"It would appear ... that the increased bombings and attacks on civilian infrastructure is really starting to have a major impact on the Ukrainian experience of basic things like connection to the internet."
Work Zoom calls amid missile strikes
Despite the war, life goes on. People turn up to work.
Some use the "two walls rule", which means working in a place like an apartment corridor or a home laundry, where the extra wall may protect them from splinters if a missile lands nearby.
Others commute to the local shopping centre where there is a generator and Wi-Fi.
When the internet goes out during work hours, they work nights and weekends to make up for lost time.
One year into the war, Irina's days are a surreal mix of Zoom calls and air raid sirens.
On November 23, a larger-than-usual missile barrage hit several regions of Ukraine.
As the missiles hit, Irina watched her colleagues in different parts of the country drop off the Zoom call.
The barrage destroyed critical infrastructure, causing the state energy authority to take power plants offline.
In an instant, the number of devices connected to the internet across the whole of Ukraine plunged by half.
"They just disappeared for a couple of working hours," Irina said, speaking over Zoom from Uzhgorod in western Ukraine.
Then the internet was restored, and they got back to selling IT products.
As she speaks with clients on the far side of the world, Irina sometimes worries if the call will drop out due to a missile strike.
"It’s really hard to build some trust with clients," she said.
For Maria in western Ukraine, air raid sirens make her anxious the internet will go down in the middle of a work call.
"After the start of the alarm, I have a bad [internet] connection for 10 to 20 minutes."
The internet fails at random times, making it hard to plan.
Victoria in Dnipro in eastern Ukraine was unable to pay for a doctor's appointment when the mobile network went down as she was about to transfer money.
"I had to go around the clinic for nearly half an hour in attempts to catch internet connection to transfer the money via mobile banking app," she said.
Her apartment often has unscheduled power outages in which the Wi-Fi also fails.
As a result, she lost her job as an English translator.
"Some days I could come to work at 9, sit there until 10 and the power would [go] off for the rest of the day."
She now works online as a tutor. If an air raid siren happens during a lesson, she asks the young students, or their parents, if they'd like to go shelter.
"As disturbing as it might sound, we're kind of used to hearing sirens.
"In cases when there is a particularly disturbing day or there had been a missile strike, I cancel the lessons or reschedule them."
Racing to repair the network
After every Russian air strike, repair crews rush to restore electricity generation and transmission.
This work is a "24/7" job that involves about 8,000 people around the country, said Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Centre in Kyiv.
"It's big, really very, very, very big work," he said, speaking over Zoom from the Ukrainian capital.
The United Nations reported in December that Russia had destroyed half of the Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
"We've had more than 1,400 rockets and drones toward our civil infrastructure, especially high-voltage grid and generation capacities," Mr Kharchenko said.
"Maybe 40 to 45 per cent of our high-voltage power was damaged or destroyed fully."
In the race to repair essential equipment, the usual safety procedures are set aside. The installation of a 300-tonne high-voltage transformer, which would have taken three months before the war, was now being completed in one week, Mr Kharchenko said.
Working at this speed is dangerous in itself. Sometimes, in addition to this, the technicians are being shelled.
"When our maintenance team go to repair something, [Russian forces] focus their fire on our stuff."
So far, 57 technicians have been killed by enemy fire, Mr Kharchenko said.
Internet repair crews also brave danger to patch cables.
Mr Matysk shared a photo from his phone, showing the remains of an internet-cable-repair vehicle that had struck a mine near Kherson in southern Ukraine.
"The driver died in the blaze," he said.
Evidence of severed fibre optic cables
In some of the territories they've occupied, Russian forces appear to have systematically destroyed access to the internet.
Mr Matsyk gives the example of Kherson, which Russia captured in March last year.
In early May, the region recorded a sudden drop in internet connectivity.
According to reports, Russian soldiers had arrived at the offices of local internet service providers and ordered them to give up control of their networks.
A few days later, connectivity was restored.
But the internet was different.
Russian authorities had rerouted mobile and internet data from Kherson through Russian networks, blocking access to much of social media, as well as sources of independent journalism.
A few weeks later, at the end of May, Kherson suffered another sharp drop in connectivity.
The reason for this was not clear at the time. Months later, after Ukraine had recaptured Kherson, Mr Matsyk travelled to the region.
He was amazed by what he saw.
Russian forces had dug up and severed the fibre optic cables that made up the "backbone" of the region's internet connection.
The damage was so great that connectivity in Kherson has not yet been restored.
Russian forces had "a lot to gain" from taking Ukraine offline, said Monash University's Dr Angus.
"The Ukrainians have been able to show what is really happening," he said.
"That makes Russia's plans and attempts to control the narrative, particularly with their own people, much more difficult."
In a report published in June last year, the UN Human Rights Office recognised internet shutdowns as a human rights violation.
For several years, the IP Observatory has provided the UN Human Rights Office with daily connectivity data from around the world to help them validate internet shutdowns, losses or anomalies.
The Ukraine connectivity data provided by the observatory could one day be used in the prosecution of war crimes.
"Amidst the long list of other human rights violations, which are no doubt occurring in this conflict, we can add the loss of internet access and freedom online," Dr Angus said.
Of greatest concern, he said, was what happened under the cover of internet shutdowns.
"When the internet goes down, it creates a darkness.
"Crimes and bad things are sometimes more easy to do in darkness."
Satellite internet to the rescue
And yet, despite these attacks, the mood of many in Ukraine is one of stubborn determination, defiance, and even optimism.
It turns out the internet is hard to kill — at least with missiles.
The company's tech sector, which employs over 300,000 people, has grown in the past year.
"Everything is fine, everyone is online," said Yuri, who manages a software development company.
His confidence rests on the Starlink satellite internet service, which was introduced to Ukraine at the start of the war.
Where fixed broadband services rely on copper or fibre optic cables in the ground, the Starlink service is mostly wireless, with internet beamed from satellites.
Hooked up to portable battery or generators, Starlink dishes provide internet through blackouts.
"All people who are working in the IT tech sector are secured with either Starlinks in their offices or their homes," he said.
"Customers are afraid to outsource to Ukraine at the moment, but in fact Ukrainians are working online and working harder to prove it's stable here."
Ukraine has received about 30,000 Starlink terminals, Mr Matsyk said.
"In this war, it shows Starlink is very useful."
He showed a photo from Bucha, a city near Kyiv, which Russia had temporarily occupied in the first weeks of the war.
The city had no power, water or gas. Beneath a non-working mobile phone tower, locals had installed a Starlink and a generator to provide internet.
"People come to this generator, charge your phone, connect with family, relatives, friends," Mr Matsyk said.
"It's very nice."
Preparing for next winter
As spring approaches and the weather warms, demand for electricity is falling, raising hopes that the worst of the long winter's blackouts has passed.
"We have not had blackouts for two to three weeks already," said Oleh, a young IT worker in Odessa in southern Ukraine.
"We have become accustomed to working and living in such a limited environment that electricity all day long seems like something out of the ordinary."
In the past week, Ukraine has not had an energy deficit, meaning demand has not exceeded generation, Ukraine's Energy Industry Research Centre's Mr Karchenko said.
"Right now we have no deficit, but it is just a moment."
The war continues, and there is no end in sight to the conflict.
"In our minds, we already talk about next winter because next winter could be even more complicated for us," Mr Kharchenko said.
