The heat dome that emptied French mortuaries is now moving over a country that cannot spare a kilowatt.

Euronews reported that as Europe's death toll topped 1,300, the record temperatures were shifting east, with Ukraine's war-damaged power grid bracing for the heat's next phase. [1] That is the second-order shock the mortality coverage keeps separate. A grid stripped of substations, transformers, and generating capacity by three years of bombardment is about to meet the one thing it has no reserve to absorb: a continent-wide demand for cooling. The paper argued last week that a heat warning only becomes care when someone opens a cooling room and checks the neighbor who lives alone. In Ukraine, the room may not have power to cool.

The mechanism is cruel in its symmetry. Heat does not only raise demand; it cuts supply. In Hungary, the government granted the Paks nuclear plant a temporary exemption from the limits on how hot its cooling water can be, specifically to avoid another steep cut in output during the wave. [2] Thermal and nuclear plants across the region lose capacity precisely when air conditioners and refrigeration demand the most. A healthy grid can ride that out. Ukraine's cannot. Its rolling curtailments, already a fixture of the war, become a public-health instrument when the same cut that dims a workshop also silences a fan in an apartment where an elderly resident sits alone.

The rest of eastern Europe shows what is arriving. Red extreme-heat warnings now cover Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, and Bosnia, and Slovakia set a national record of 40.5C. [2] Those countries meet the heat with functioning grids and thousands of cooling centers. Ukraine meets it with a network held together by repairs and imports, in a war that has made every substation a target.

The divergence is one of category. Western outlets file the heat under climate and mortality; the war desk files Ukraine's grid under Russia. The story is the overlap. A demand surge is about to test infrastructure that was engineered for peacetime and is now running under fire. The useful question is not how hot Kyiv gets. It is whether a grid at wartime capacity can keep the vulnerable cool when the heat itself is the next thing trying to take it down.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow