By Galina Korol | 2025-08-11

Lice, worms and thirst. That's what children in Russian-occupied Donetsk region of Ukraine say awaits them without clean water. Their plea to Russia's President Vladimir Putin is simple: let us drink.

"Without water, we won't survive… Someone dreams of having a dog or of getting a new phone. But we dream of water," a girl said in a video posted July 27 by the group Amulet of Life on its Telegram channel.

"We are the children of Donbas. And our future begins today. But without water there is no life. Uncle Vova [Putin], help us so we can simply wash, drink and live," another child in the video message said.

Earlier in July, adult residents petitioned the Kremlin with similar complaints, according to the independent outlet iStories.

The pleas lay bare a crisis where drinking water is scarcer than luxury goods and where survival depends on help that never comes.

Dirty water and bags for toilets

Residents say the water crisis in the Donetsk region is neither temporary nor local. In many cities, water runs only once every three or four days and often never reaches upper floors, especially in older buildings.

"People are forced to carry water in buckets from basements. The elderly, families with children, the disabled -- all suffer and have been suffering for years," the authors of the appeal said, as quoted by iStories.

The limited water supply is often cloudy, full of sediment and unfit for cooking or hygiene, yet costs as much as drinking water.

Once known as the "city of a million roses," Donetsk city is now strewn with garbage and human waste.

"There's no way to flush the toilet. It's common practice: Donetsk residents put a little bag in the toilet. Then those who are decent throw the bags in the trash. Those who aren't throw them out the window. Neighbors fight with people like that," Oleg Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker and Kremlin collaborator, wrote on Telegram on July 18.

Occupation authorities have set a daily limit of 45 liters of water per person, according to a July report by Realnaya Gazeta, but did not explain how to obtain it when taps are dry.

Residents rely on bottled water, scarce and costly at 5 RUB ($0.06) per liter -- twice the price in nearby Rostov. To placate them, the occupation administration cut the price to 3.5 RUB ($0.04), calling it "subsidized water."

"I've heard of subsidized bread, but never of subsidized water. Maybe it exists somewhere in Africa, and now this gimmick has come to Donetsk along with Russia," Ukrainian journalist and Donetsk native Denys Kazanskyi wrote on his Facebook page on July 29.

The self-proclaimed government of the Donetsk People's Republic admits reserves are critically low, and even pro-Russian bloggers question why conditions have worsened under Moscow's control.

"Complete lawlessness. People waited eight years to become part of Russia, endured Ukrainian shelling, and in the end the situation is worse than it was before the 'special military operation.' Unimaginable beastliness," wrote Yuri Kotenok, a pro-Kremlin blogger.

Expected collapse

Pavlo Lysianskyi, director of Ukraine's Institute for Strategic Studies and Security, called the situation in Donbas a "catastrophe." He blamed illegal coal and mineral mining, which disrupts underground structures and lets water escape.

"The excavators dig, upsetting tectonics. Water is escaping into the cracks," he told Kontur. Additionally, "money is being stolen [by the occupation authorities], and no one has been repairing the pipes for years."

Kostyantyn Batozsky, director of the Azov Development Agency, said Donbas has long faced water issues. Its main source, the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas Canal, was built in Soviet times to link the Siverskyi Donets River in the Kharkiv region to the Kalmius in Donetsk. The 133km-long system includes more than 100km of open channel and 27km of pipelines and bridges.

Water kept flowing after the war began in 2014, but the full-scale invasion in 2022 destroyed the aqueduct.

"The occupiers used these pipes [of the canal] for their own logistics, using them to move around Chasiv Yar," Batozsky told Kontur. Rebuilding the canal is currently impossible because of active combat. "It's essentially the front line."

Petro Andriushchenko, head of the Center for the Study of the Occupation, said cities once relied on nearby reservoirs as backups. Those serving Greater Donetsk were already in poor condition this spring and have since nearly dried up.

"In other words, [the occupation authorities] have come to a situation where there is no water -- physically there is none, neither in the backup reservoirs nor in the supply canals," he explained, noting the crisis will only deepen and that nothing like the current catastrophe in Donbas has ever occurred in Central Europe.

Everything requires water

Water is the source of life, and its absence brings hardship, disease and death.

Andriushchenko warned that the main consequence in Donbas will be the complete disappearance of water, triggering both daily struggles and outbreaks of illness.

"Even hospitals there are without water. But you understand, disinfection and so on -- this is a healthcare disaster," added Lysianskyi. "Any factory requires water," and goods produced in the occupied territory will have questionable quality.

Batozsky said agriculture, like industry, faces collapse without irrigation. Donetsk's infrastructure is also failing, with ruptured pipelines unlikely to be repaired before winter, leaving residents without heat or water.

Attempts to pump out water from mines could cause local earthquakes and soil subsidence, according to him. Mining dumps, man-made mountains of rock, are held together by water, and without it, "everything that is empty must be filled with something. It will just cave in."

"Wherever Russia goes, it turns everything around into Russia," Batozsky said, referring to the poor state of Russia's own remote regions.

The crisis could be fixed quickly but only with real solutions and an end to the war, Andriushchenko said.

"None of this is happening," he continued. "The Russians have no other real technical solutions."