Pakistan, Jan. 25 -- It is hard to sell diplomacy as progress when the lights go out mid-sentence. On Saturday, as negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the United States met in Abu Dhabi for a second day of talks-before parting ways without announcing any results in their efforts to end the nearly four-year-long war-Kyiv awoke to another punishing night of drones and missiles. The city's mayor said nearly 6,000 buildings were left without heat after the strike, with temperatures well below freezing. This is what war looks like when it is engineered to talk over itself.

Russia's winter campaign against energy infrastructure has relentlessly pushed ordinary people to their limits, transforming daily life into a struggle for safety. What wa...