‘Hospitals and kindergartens are the first to suffer’ Russia destroyed the water infrastructure in Ukraine’s occupied Donbas. Civilians are paying the price.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Donbas triggered chronic water shortages across Ukraine’s Donetsk region beginning in 2014. By the time Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, the infrastructure supplying water to the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DNR) was already crumbling. Intense shelling and airstrikes destroyed what remained, including a key dam that once routed water to the region. Although Russia’s Defense Ministry later constructed a new Don–Donbas water pipeline, the occupied Donetsk region was facing a severe water shortage by the summer of 2025. In a bid for help, desperate residents published an open letter to Vladimir Putin, warning of an unfolding “humanitarian and environmental disaster.” Meduza reports on how those living under occupation in this parched region are fighting to survive.
Please note: Names in this story have been changed due to security concerns.
‘Nobody knows when the water will reach your building’
It’s early September 2025 in Donetsk. A car pulls up outside a kindergarten in the city. From the passenger seat, a woman begins filming on her phone as two young men behind the school fence fill containers from a large, 1,000-liter water tank. On the other side of the fence, an elderly woman looks on. The woman in the car accuses all three of stealing water meant for children.
“You’ve all lost your sense of decency over this water,” she says angrily.
“And when will it [the water] come back?” the elderly woman asks. “This is going to start a war, dear, mark my words. People will be killed over this. And you’re talking about—“
“The war’s been going on for 11 years already!” the woman interjects.
Later, the woman posts a video of the interaction on social media. After it’s shared by a local Telegram channel, comments flood in. Reactions are sharply divided: some are outraged by the alleged theft, others condemn the woman’s behavior, and many call out local officials for the region’s deepening water crisis.
Our only hope is you. Support Meduza before it’s too late.
Donetsk has served as the de facto capital of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic “(DNR) since 2014. In 2022, Russia declared the annexation of the entire Donetsk region — though in practice, Ukraine still controls about a quarter of it. Now in the fourth year of full-scale war, Russian forces continue their offensive, and the front lines remain just 30–40 kilometers (19–25 miles) from Donetsk. The city and surrounding areas are under near-constant shelling. On September 8, Ukrainian forces struck targets near Makiivka and Yenakiieve; Russian-installed officials reported two dead and 16 wounded. A day later, a Russian airstrike killed 25 people in the village of Yarova, in the Kramatorsk district, roughly 160 kilometers (99 miles) from Donetsk.
According to Politico, when the full-scale invasion began, most of the region’s water infrastructure was aging but still operational. Since then, ongoing fighting has destroyed nearly all of its key systems.
In July 2025, occupation authorities introduced water rationing. By late summer, the situation had reached a crisis point. With scorching heat and drought conditions, many residents no longer had enough water for basic needs like showering or washing dishes.
“Water is supplied on a schedule — once every three days, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.,” a Donetsk resident named Igor tells Meduza. “But even that schedule often collapses. A pumping station might lose power, or a pipe might burst. The delivery times are approximate. No one knows exactly when the water will reach your building.”
Even when water does arrive, Igor says, the pressure is often too weak to reach apartments above the fourth floor. As a result, residents have resorted to tapping into basement pipes, running hoses out onto the street or to building entrances, then carrying water upstairs by hand.
To mitigate the shortage, occupation authorities have launched a water delivery service using tanker trucks. To take advantage of it, residents have to call the administration, give their address, and request a delivery. But the trucks only operate during the day, making the service inaccessible to residents who work regular full-time hours. According to Igor, many don’t even know the service exists.
In an effort to conserve water, some schools and hospitals have closed their restrooms, prompting widespread complaints on social media. While many schools have installed large water tanks on their grounds, it’s often not enough. As a result, school administrators have shortened in-person class hours.
“Hospitals, kindergartens, and schools are the first to suffer in these conditions,” Igor says. “Staff have to haul buckets of water themselves — if it even gets delivered at all.”
Volunteers have stepped in to help. In early August, a company in Taganrog sent 22 tons of drinking water to the annexed region — enough to supply just four hospitals for a few days. (Donetsk has 27 hospitals in total.) Business owners in Taganrog say they plan to add new water vending machines and continue making deliveries. But for now, the effort is falling far short of what’s needed.
‘We wash our dishes cautiously’
“It’s regular people who are having the hardest time,” says Igor. “I can’t even imagine what it’s like for elderly people living alone, women, people with disabilities, or anyone who’s sick.”
Another Donetsk resident named Anton says the tap water in his building runs a rusty orange color. “Honestly, it’s scary to even use it,” he says. At times, the water turns a chemical blue — the result of detergent flowing back into the pipes from washing machines due to low water pressure.
A similar situation is unfolding in Mariupol, a city nearly destroyed in the early months of the full-scale war. There, tap water is also discolored — rusty and yellow — and, as in Donetsk, it rarely reaches the upper floors of apartment buildings.
“The supply schedule is all over the place, and water barely reaches the fifth floor or higher. We spend hours filling whatever containers we can. Even then, it’s only enough for flushing the toilet or doing laundry. We wash dishes cautiously — the water’s yellow. And some buildings don’t even have [water at all],” says Alexander, a Mariupol resident.
He says people are relying on survival habits they learned during the 2022 siege, when Russian forces blockaded the city for nearly three months. “There’s no way to take a proper shower. People are bathing in fountains and the sea — after 2022, we’re used to it. We used to cook over open fires and melt snow for water back then,” Alexander recalls.
The crisis isn’t limited to technical water. Drinking water is also in short supply. In July, prices surged to five rubles ($0.06) per liter amid growing shortages. On July 25, the occupation authorities imposed a temporary price cap of 3.5 rubles per liter for bulk drinking water, valid for three months.
The cap came shortly after Ukrainian shelling on July 29 damaged the Verkhniokalmiuska Filter Station, a treatment plant that supplies water to Donetsk, parts of Makiivka, and the town of Yasynuvata (located 15 kilometers east and 25 kilometers north of Donetsk, respectively). In response, prosecutors and trade inspectors began checking sales points for compliance. According to official figures, just 32 out of more than 3,000 outlets were found to be overcharging.
“Once the price for bulk water hit five rubles a liter, [DNR head Denis] Pushilin decided to freeze prices at 3.50,” Ukrainian blogger Denis Kazanskyi, a Donetsk native, wrote on Telegram in early August. “Guess what happened next? That’s right: the water disappeared. Sellers didn’t want to take a loss, so now there’s no bulk water at all. The only thing left is bottled water — for 20 rubles a liter.”
Back in Donetsk, Anton says simply finding drinking water can take days.
Before all this, [private] delivery services used to bring bottled water every four days. Now, the situation is pretty bad. We call Akvadonna [a private water delivery service], and they tell us they’re not taking new orders — demand is too high. They ask us to call back in three or four days, saying, “Maybe things will improve.” So we’re left searching for places to fill our containers. Sometimes that takes hours.
One alternative is collecting water from private wells, dug by homeowners on their property. Most share freely, Anton says — but there’s nowhere near enough to meet demand.
‘Any repairs that happen are reactive’
In 2023, the occupation authorities in Donetsk launched the Don–Donbas pipeline in an effort to address the region’s worsening water shortage. The pipeline draws water from the Don River and channels it through Russia’s Rostov region into the Donetsk region.
The project was intended to compensate for the loss of the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas canal, which had previously served as the region’s main water source. Since 2014, supply from the canal had been disrupted. Both the de facto authorities in Donetsk and the Ukrainian government blamed the interruptions on the ongoing conflict. Ukraine also cited the DNR’s mounting unpaid debts to the Donbas Water Company, which was forced to operate at a loss. As a result of these debts, the canal’s pumping stations were frequently disconnected from the power grid.
In February 2022, shelling disabled the pumping station in the village of Mayorsk, near the front-line town of Horlivka, cutting off water to the greater Donetsk agglomeration. By May, Russian forces had reached the canal’s water intake point on the Siverskyi Donets River near Sloviansk. Since then, the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas canal has been completely out of operation.
The new Don–Donbas pipeline, while intended to provide a lifeline to Donetsk, has had unintended consequences for Rostov region residents, who were already facing water shortages of their own. In recent years, unusually warm autumns and winters have caused water levels in the Don River and the Tsimlyansk Reservoir — the region’s two primary sources — to fall to dangerous lows. While household water use in Rostov-on-Don remains largely unaffected, receding river levels have triggered fish die-offs and cut into the availability of water for irrigation, a critical issue in this heavily agricultural region.
Meanwhile, construction of the pipeline left its mark on the local infrastructure. Heavy trucks used during the project damaged roads in three villages in the Azov district of Rostov region. When the local administration sued the Defense Ministry’s Military Construction Company, which oversaw the project, the court ultimately ruled in favor of the military.
The pipeline project was personally supervised by Timur Ivanov, then deputy to former Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. Ivanov made multiple site visits during the construction. In April 2024, he was arrested by Russia’s Investigative Committee on charges of accepting a particularly large bribe — one reportedly exceeding one billion rubles ($12.1 million). That same month, Alexander Fomin, co-founder of the Defense Ministry contractor OlympCityStroy, was also arrested by Moscow’s Basmanny District Court on charges of offering a large bribe. OlympCityStroy was the main contractor behind the Don–Donbas Pipeline. Whether Fomin’s case is directly linked to embezzlement during the pipeline’s construction remains unclear.
According to Pavlo Lysianskyi, director of the Kyiv-based National Institute for Strategic Studies, the water crisis in the Donetsk region stems not only from corruption, but from the catastrophic state of the region’s water distribution system. “In the DNR, even if 100 percent of the water leaves the source, at best only 25 to 35 percent actually reaches the consumer,” Lysianskyi explains.
The rest is lost to leaks, illegal connections, and uncontrolled discharges. But it’s not just about pipes. Keeping the system running also requires disinfection, chemical treatment, and regular maintenance. Right now, any repairs that do happen are mostly reactive — not preventive.
‘The reserves are almost gone’
Seeing the regional occupation authorities unable to cope with the worsening water shortage, Donetsk residents have begun appealing directly to the Russian federal government for help. Many believe the regional administration should have seen the disaster coming. Rivers in the area began drying up as early as the 2010s due to intensifying heat waves, and the war has only accelerated the decline. Reconstruction of the region’s water infrastructure has stalled amid ongoing fighting, and the crisis has steadily worsened. According to BBC News Russian, nine of Donbas’s 10 largest reservoirs have significantly dried up over the course of the full-scale war.
“The water problems started back in 2022,” recalls Igor, a Donetsk resident.
Until spring 2023, there was no water at all. Then they started giving it once every three days — and that felt like a blessing. Later it was every other day, and we started to believe things were improving. And then suddenly we’re told, ‘Oh, the rivers have dried up!’ What nonsense. Yes, the water levels have dropped to critical lows, but that was entirely predictable. Everyone knew this would happen — except the authorities. The river mouths are overgrown with reeds, the bottoms covered in silt. Of course it’s all turning to swampland. Of course the water levels are falling.
In late July, as conditions deteriorated, DNR residents published an open letter addressed to Vladimir Putin, urging him to “intervene in a crisis that has gone far beyond a utilities issue and turned into a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe.” The letter described erratic water supplies, soaring prices for drinking water, and persistent failures with the Don–Donbas pipeline. The authors wrote that they were “fighting for survival every single day.”
Among their chief frustrations was the official daily water allowance: 330 liters (87 gallons) per person, available only during a four-hour window, from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
“No one explains how you’re supposed to collect 330 liters in four hours. It’s not just ridiculous — it’s insulting,” the letter said. “And while this is happening, construction continues on new apartment blocks, roads are being paved, fountains are running, water shows are being staged — it all feels like a slap in the face to people living without water.”
Putin did not respond to the letter. Residents followed up by posting a video appeal, this time featuring children asking “Uncle Vova” for help. “Water should be a simple thing, but for us, it’s a luxury. We’re kids — we should be laughing and running around, not waiting for water deliveries. Uncle Vova, please help us!” pleaded one girl in the video, posted at the end of July 2025. The Kremlin did not reponsd.
In early August, DNR head Denis Pushilin met with Putin in Moscow to discuss the worsening situation. Pushilin reported that the new Don–Donbas pipeline currently supplies 250,000 cubic meters (8.8 million cubic feet) of water per day — less than half of what the Donetsk metropolitan area needs to function.
Sign up for The Beet
Underreported stories. Fresh perspectives. From Budapest to Bishkek.
Putin appeared aware of the severity of the shortages. “Unfortunately, the pipeline that was built doesn’t solve all the problems,” he said. “In fact, it hasn’t even reached its planned capacity yet, as far as I understand. And the government has reported another issue — massive water losses during transport.”
Pushilin confirmed the extent of the losses, reporting that up to 60 percent of the water is lost before it reaches consumers.
“The Don pipeline gives us 250,000 cubic meters a day,” Pushilin said during a live Q&A broadcast on August 19 via social media and regional TV. “We used to make up the difference from local reserves — about the same amount. But those reserves are now almost gone. What’s left can only provide 50,000 to 60,000 cubic meters a day.”
In a bid to close the gap, occupation authorities say they plan to build a second pipeline by the end of 2025, this time from the Vuhlehirsk Reservoir, the region’s largest, located about 70 kilometers from Donetsk.
Sign up for Meduza’s daily newsletter
A digest of Russia’s investigative reports and news analysis. If it matters, we summarize it.
‘Unfit for washing or drinking’
Pavlo Lysianskyi warns that in their desperation, the occupation authorities in Donetsk could begin using mine water to offset the shortfall in technical water — the non-potable supply used for household tasks like flushing toilets or washing floors. This kind of water seeps into coal mines from nearby natural sources and is often highly contaminated.
Before 2014, Donbas had roughly 100 active coal mines. After parts of the region fell under Russian control, that number dropped to just 15. Amid the war, pumping operations in many mines have ceased altogether. If this water is now being tapped to ease shortages, Lysianskyi cautions, it could pose serious health risks to local residents, as mine water frequently contains toxic substances such as heavy metals and sulfates.
Whether DNR authorities are actually using mine water remains unclear — but the signs are troubling. Telegram channels covering daily life in the occupied region have shared photos of brownish tap water, and even pro-war commentators have raised concerns. On August 18, Komsomolskaya Pravda war correspondent Dmitry Steshin revealed he had contracted an infection after washing his face with technical water in Donetsk. “There are amoebas living under my eyelids, literally eating away at my cornea,” he wrote.
Steshin said he had used water from a bucket he’d left out in the sun — a trick he’d described at the time as a “lifehack.”
“I don’t even want to imagine what’s going on inside the big black tanks or the blue 200- to 400-liter barrels people keep in their apartments in Donetsk. What kind of life forms are breeding in there? Over the past month, water for Donetsk has been scraped together from wherever it could be found, so this ‘lifehack’ isn’t to blame — this water simply isn’t fit for washing or drinking,” he wrote on Telegram.
* * *
On September 4, Valery Skorokhodov, head of the United Russia party’s Donetsk branch, responded to residents’ complaints — though not in the way they’d hoped. Instead, he called on the Russian Investigative Committee to examine whether those voicing criticism over the lack of water were “deliberately trying to destabilize the situation in the country.”
Despite the deteriorating conditions, Donetsk resident Anton says he doesn’t know anyone who has left the city because of the crisis. “Our people are resilient,” he maintains. “They’ve been through so much already that this water issue doesn’t even rank among the worst of it.”