The centralized water supply in Russian-occupied south-eastern Ukraine has collapsed leaving thousands of households having to buy overpriced bottles for cooking and washing, wait for days for a water bowser to arrive, or to scavenge for water from lakes, ponds and puddles.
Prior to the war, Donetsk was, by many measures, one of Ukraine’s richest cities – but no more. These days, authorities turn on the taps to homes and apartments for two to four hours every three days.
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In Mariupol, a port city on the heavily polluted Kalmius River, water is turned on for a few hours every other day.
In Yenakikeve, a city that has even fewer alternate water sources than Donetsk and Mariupol, water supplies are once every four days, Ukrainian and pro-Russia news platforms said on Wednesday.
Water shortages in Donbas towns and cities have become increasingly common during the summer since Russia’s first incursions in Ukraine in 2014 have reached critical levels.
Even after Russia’s second, 2022, full-scale invasion, total shut-offs of water supplies for days and even weeks were unheard of except in those towns and cities actually caught up in combat. Now the roughly two million residents who live in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) face a situation where water or the lack of it has often replaced the war as the top news item.
Screenshot from a UNIAN video of a resident of the town Makiivka, Donetsk region, collecting water from a puddle after the failure of the central water supply in late July.
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The semi-independent Tipichniy Donetsk news website published images of locals thronging around the site of a broken water main to dip spilled water from the street on Wednesday. The DPR-controlled television channel Perviiy Repusublikansky Kanal, in an Aug. 1 report, showed residents in the town of Krasnogvardeyske, near Donetsk, filling up baby bathtubs, soup pots, and inflatable children’s swimming pools with water that had a distinctly yellowish discoloration.
A July 23 article in the pro-Moscow news platform Red Line (Красная Линия) fumed: “The quality of the supplied water is disgusting – cloudy, with dirty sediment, it spoils plumbing and pipes, it is impossible to use it for cooking or personal hygiene. But it is paid for as drinking water.”
It added: “The water does not reach the upper floors, especially in older housing. People are forced to carry water in buckets from the basements to the top of hi-rises. The elderly, families with children, the disabled – everyone suffers.”
Red Line said that in Donetsk – where public utilities normally provide water in unlimited quantities to users for a symbolic fee of less than $5 a month – customers must buy bottled water costing 5-7 cents a liter, often more.
Kyiv Post estimated that with average summer water consumption rates, a typical Donetsk retiree would spend his entire monthly pension on bottled water alone in about two weeks.
Donetsk resident Alina Andreevskaya, a DPR-promoted social media influencer, said in a TikTok video on Wednesday said the water shortages were an unacceptable burden on Donetsk residents, complaining it was impossible for her to put her admirers’ rose bouquets in vases.
Screenshot from TikTok video where social media influencer Alina Andreevskaya complained the Donetsk water shortage made it impossible for her to water flowers presented by her “admirers.”
On Aug. 4, the Kremlin televised a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Denis Pushilin, the DPR “President” who accused Ukraine of imposing a “water blockade” on his territory by blowing up the Siversky Donets Canal and other water supply infrastructure.
Putin – in an apparent deflection of the problem – said that poor maintenance and massive leaks in the Donbas water delivery infrastructure caused the loss of about 60% of water before it reached customers.
The longstanding Kyiv position on war damage in the Donbas is that it’s Russia’s responsibility because Russia invaded the region and started a war in 2014. Following Russia’s 2022 invasion, major sections of the Sivirsky Donets river system became active battlegrounds that, in some locations, lasting for more than two years.
Built during the 1950s to supply fresh water to the heavily industrialized Donbas, the Siversky Donets canal runs about 133 kilometers (83.1 miles) from the Ukrainian-controlled city of Sloviansk southward through the length of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, about half of which is now occupied by Russia. Russia’s ongoing attempts to conquer the whole of the Donetsk region has seen fighting over most of the length of the canal.
Screenshot from Ukraine’s 5th Assault Brigade June 13 drone video showing combat damage to the pipeline in the Sivirsky Donets water transport network following more than eighteen months.
Since 2022 officials from Russia and the DPR have attempted to build an alternate network, to replace Siversky Donets water with water piped in from the Don River in Russia – the “Don-Donbas pipeline.”
The 194-kilometer (122-mile) infrastructure project, supposedly completed in mid-2023, is, according to local news, a high-profile failure. Red Line complained: “The water pipeline from the Don, built as a ‘salvation’, works inefficiently: it provides only 6% of the city’s needs. Numerous violations were committed during its construction. It constantly breaks.”
In 2024 the senior Russian official heading up the project was arrested on suspicion of massive corruption – Radio Liberty reported on Wednesday that as much as $930 million in state funds may have been stolen.
Ukrainian political commentator Anton Gerashchenko commenting on X said DPR leadership was enforcing a two-tiered water truck rationing regime – daily visits are being made to homes and businesses owned by top officials while average citizens can wait for days for a truck to show up in their neighborhood.
In an extremely rare public protest, on July 24, thirty citizens angry over a lack of water in their homes blocked traffic along a major Donetsk roadway. Demonstrators said: “life without water is impossible.” Even more unusually police did not immediately intervene. An Aug. 2 video appeared on anti-government platforms showing workers hosing down grass and bushes adorning the front lawn of the DPR central administration building.
On Thursday, Tatyana Montyan, a high-profile Donetsk-based lawyer and human rights activist, accused local authorities of not taking the Donbas region’s water problems and damage to the Siversky Donets system seriously, and pretending it might be fixed easily.
“The canal is practically destroyed, it’s buried under shells and mines, corpses and piles of burnt combat vehicles, and the dams and pump stations have been smashed into garbage. In order to bring water supply to the Donbas region even to a minimum level, it would be necessary for the front to move 40-50 kilometers (25-30 miles),” Montyan wrote. “It would be hundreds of billions of rubles that would have to be invested, for the water supply infrastructure to be rebuilt.”
Gerashchenko said that the Donbas water problem, and any attempt to repair it, is much deeper and more complicated than war damage caused to a single canal
“In the Donetsk coal basin, nearly all [coal] mines have been flooded during the Russian occupation. As long as the mines were operating or kept in dry conservation [when the region was under Ukrainian control] water was regularly pumped out. But after Russian forces occupied the city in 2014, they first sold all the equipment from these mines for scrap metal, and then simply flooded everything,” Gerashchenko said in his post on X on July 29.
“Flooding the mines means stopping the pumping of water from them – disrupting water tables, underground rivers, etc. – it all does the job. The tragedy is that once a mine fills up, its contents mix with groundwater. The resulting excess pressure forces this mine water to rise to the surface, creating huge rust-colored swamps – that’s iron oxide. As a result, all water tables in Donbas are now unfit for any use. This is a massive environmental catastrophe that no one is talking about,” Gerashchenko said.
