Kiev – City managers in the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Tuesday began energy conservation measures because of falling supplies of natural gas, officials at the power company Kievenergo said.

Kiev residents, for their part, were resorting to tried and true methods of beating the cold, as yet another gas war with Russia and a vicious cold snap enveloped their city.

“A fur hat is the way to survive the winter,” said Vadym Panchenko, a pensioner and taking in the fresh air at Kiev’s central Maidan Square. “No one can turn off a fur hat.”

Panchenko’s headgear is far from stylish in today’s surprisingly stylish Kiev. Where once Soviet-era lumpy coats, clunky shoes, and animal-skin hats once dominated the snowy sidewalks of the Ukrainian capital, now down jackets and knit caps are standard winter wear, along with knee high boots on dangerously high heels for many if not most of the women.

“My mama may have been right,” admitted student Yulia Romatsova, hatless and shivering in an expensive matching leather jacket, miniskirt, and boots, as as she made her way to the Maidan metro stop. “Today perhaps I should have worn mittens.”

Heating in Kiev as in most former Soviet cities is centrally- produced and highly inefficient, with apartment buildings and homes kept warm by a regional utility providing heat to all customers at a fixed temperature.

Two of the city’s five power plants would shift fuel use from natural gas to diesel, and reduce the temperature of heat provided to homes through the metropolis, because of limited supplies of gas, city authorities said on Wednesday.

Thermostats allowing individual homeowners to set temperatures within their residence are rare. And so, with the mercury plunging and their government’s negotiations with the Kremlin at a dead end, Kievites are falling back on tried and true methods of keeping cold away from home and hearth.

“I cook lots of soups and hot drinks, it warms the belly and the heat from the kitchen helps keep the apartment warm,” said housewife Vitalina Ilchenko. “And in an emergency of course you can just run the oven and not cook anything – but we’re not to that point yet.”

But that day may be coming, officials warned. Kiev at present consumption rates as of Wednesday morning had a mere four days left during which it could operate all heating stations on gas, before risking a major shutdown, a Kievenergo official said.

Members of the opposition in the Kiev city council offered even more dire predictions, with Dmitry Andrievsky, a pro-Europe councilman, saying “we have less than a week of diesel available, and after that we are looking at an entire collapse of the city heating system … and a catastrophe affecting millions.”

The Kiev city hall announcement on heating policy came during the coldest winter in Ukraine in a half-decade. The Kiev government this season nonetheless has left radiators throughout the city at lower than usual temperatures, citing a tight metropolitan budget due to the international financial crisis and falling tax revenue.

The Russian natural gas embargo on Ukraine begun at the start of 2009 was a contributing factor, but not the only grounds for emergency energy economy measures, according to a Kievenergo statement.

Kievenergo in early December drastically reduced supplies of hot water throughout the city, leaving homes in outlying regions with only cold water for washing and cooking, for as much as a week at a time.

Yet the inefficiency by which Kiev, a city of four million, manages its energy is scaldingly evident in the water faucet of Oksana Konstantinova, an office manager living a few blocks from a heating plant in Kiev’s residential Darnitsa district.

“You open the tap, and boiling water comes out, there is no cold,” she said. “To get normal water, you have to live at least a kilometre from the heating plant.”

The state of public utilities in the Ukrainian capital is widely considered a bellwether of the quality of government management in the former Soviet republic. Public services including heating, power, sewage treatment, and transportation are almost always worse – much worse – in Ukraine’s provincial cities as compared to Kiev.

Heating reductions and partial cut-offs already have been reported across the former Soviet republic, particularly in Lviv, Chernovtsi, and Zaporizhia.

“We’ll survive somehow if they turn off the heat all the way, we’ve done it before” Panchenko said. “But it could be uncomfortable.” (dpa)