Travelling out of the UK this week, I stood at a night bus stop for 35 minutes at -6 degrees Celsius, remembering how the cold bites your face immediately, but only creeps into the rest of you, with every limb feeling steadily colder.
Given long enough, which is just a few hours, the body stops trying to heat your limbs and concentrates on keeping your inner organs warm and functioning.
With your body temperature dropping, you start to feel confused, and then sleepy, as your heartbeat slows: and then you pass away.
It is not the very ugliest way to die, but it can kill you as you sleep overnight, and in minutes in extreme cold: which is exactly the kind of cold they get in Ukraine.
For, as I write, the temperatures in Ukraine are set to fall to -6 degrees Celsius again tonight, and with far worse ahead.
Tomorrow, in apartment blocks, rural homes, cellars, and across that nation with its bombed-out energy infrastructure, old people, children, and even a few healthy adults will not awake, victims of hypothermia.
Of course, we have read about how it could be a war crime to have deliberately knocked out a population’s heating systems in the depths of winter, but, as yet, the sheer enormity of the civilian genocide underway does not appear to have hit us.
And that despite the 3.9 million Ukrainians that died in 1933 in a Russian-inflicted famine, as it ripped up the country’s farming system.
Called the Holodomar, you can find, easily enough, photos of that terrible year of manmade famine, with men, women and children lying dead on the streets.
Yet, at least, those deaths were the consequence of ill-conceived policy. This time, the killing is truly a genocide, defined as the deliberate and systematic killing of a national or ethnic group.
For there is no other reason to knock out civilian energy infrastructure but to inflict death. Human bodies cannot survive at these freezing temperatures.
Indeed, Russian TV pundits, of them, appear to even relish the dying ahead, as some brilliant strategic move.
But with Ukrainians now dying daily in their homes and beds, will we wonder later how we didn’t quite notice the sheer scale of the massacre underway: as Russia systematically thrust a previously heated nation into no heating at even -25 degrees?
