{"id":533347,"date":"2025-10-28T13:48:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/533347\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T13:48:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:48:16","slug":"ticking-environmental-bomb-water-crisis-worsens-in-russia-annexed-donbas-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/533347\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Ticking environmental bomb\u2019: Water crisis worsens in Russia-annexed Donbas | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> To extract water from tree leaves, branches are wrapped in a plastic bag for several hours. The evaporated liquid is drinkable after boiling.<\/p>\n

That is not a survivalist tip, but a life hack from the Russia-occupied part of the parched Donbas region in Ukraine\u2019s southeast that went viral in recent months.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

The majority of the region\u2019s estimated population of 3.5 million people are believed to be suffering from a worsening man-made drought after years of shelling destroyed the arid region\u2019s sophisticated water supply system, according to residents, Moscow-backed separatist authorities and Ukrainian officials.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, uncontrolled mining is poisoning the remaining water sources with chemicals, methane, carcinogens and radioactive isotopes. Experts have warned that the Donbas has turned into a \u201cticking environmental bomb\u201d.<\/p>\n

The most \u2018complicated\u2019 challenge<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re slowly dying of thirst,\u201d Anna, a 29-year-old mother of two in the city of Donetsk told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

She withheld her last name because contacts with foreign media could land her in a detention centre, where people have reported<\/a> torture and killings.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of taking a bath or a shower, the kids wipe themselves with a wet cloth,\u201d Anna said. \u201cDonetsk is now [the] Sahara.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like any ex-Soviet megalopolis, Donetsk and its metropolitan area consist of apartment buildings with centralised water and heat supplies.<\/p>\n

Since 2014, a wider area in the Donetsk region has been known as the separatist \u201cPeople\u2019s Republic of Donetsk\u201d, or DPR, which Russia annexed in 2022 but retains symbols of independence such as a \u201ccabinet\u201d and a \u201cparliament\u201d that are, however, fully controlled by Moscow.<\/p>\n

Donbas, of which Donetsk is a part, was home to 6.5 million people before 2014. Almost half are believed to have fled the separatist uprising 11 years ago and Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion, which began in 2022.<\/p>\n

For most of 2025, residents had running water for only several hours a week. In recent months, the separatist-controlled part of the neighbouring Luhansk region has faced the same issue.<\/p>\n

The situation painfully contrasts with pre-war Donetsk, which was filled with parks, fountains and countless beds of roses.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most difficult thing is the difference between what is now and what was before\u201d 2014, a resident told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get used to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Water from the tap is often pungent, yellow or brown, and needs to be boiled and filtered, according to hundreds of complaints on The Water Call Donetsk, a Telegram channel devoted to water delivery timetables. The channel does not appear to be run by separatists, but its users do not criticise local officials or Moscow.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the colour of urine,\u201d one subscriber wrote of the water.<\/p>\n

Another said water pressure was high enough for a couple of hours to start a washing machine, but somebody else complained that his district \u201cdidn\u2019t even get a drop\u201d in a week. One more subscriber warned that \u201ceven bottled water should be boiled [as] there are cases of cholera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera contacted 10 subscribers. Some did not respond while others refused to be interviewed.<\/p>\n

While separatist officials have not announced infections, Ukraine has reported outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are horrible stories caused by the water crisis,\u201d Petro Andryushchenko, a former mayor of the Russia-occupied Donetsk city of Mariupol, said in televised remarks in mid-September. \u201cAnyone who can leave leaves because it\u2019s impossible to live there.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Donetsk residents Al Jazeera interviewed said they have nothing to flush their toilets with and resort to plastic bags to collect faeces.<\/p>\n

\"Interactive_Frontline_Ukraine_Oct23_2025-1761292403\"(Al Jazeera)<\/p>\n

\u201cNormal people throw the bags in rubbish bins. Others throw them out of the window,\u201d former Ukrainian lawmaker-turned-separatist Oleg Tsaryov, who fled to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt in 2023, wrote on Telegram in July.<\/p>\n

Residents are also afraid about the winter. It will bring snow that could be melted for drinking, but the central heating systems will not run without water.<\/p>\n

Separatist leaders have acknowledged the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cWater levels fell critically. The reservoirs are practically empty,\u201d the region\u2019s \u201cprime minister\u201d Andrey Chertkov told the Russian RIA Novosti agency in July.<\/p>\n

\u201cWater supply is our most complicated and serious challenge,\u201d Denis Pushilin, the Russia-installed leader of parts of the Donetsk region, told Russian President Vladimir Putin a month later.<\/p>\n

In response, Putin admitted that the Russia-built canal from the Don River in southeastern Russia \u201cdoesn\u2019t solve all problems\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t reach its planned capacity,\u201d Putin said.<\/p>\n

The meeting followed the release of a video in which several Donetsk children were seen urging Putin to restore the water supply.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that you are wise and strong, uncle president! Give us this simplest miracle \u2013 water in our homes!\u201d a teenage girl said in the video, holding her right hand to her heart.<\/p>\n

A dead subcontractor<\/p>\n

Even if the canal reaches its \u201cplanned capacity\u201d, Moscow\u2019s failure to tackle the drought reflects its deeper problems with corruption, observers said.<\/p>\n

Russian Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov oversaw the construction of the $2.45bn canal, which ended in 2023.<\/p>\n

The maximum capacity is 350,000 litres (93,000 gallons) of water a day \u2013 only a third of what the city of Donetsk alone needs. But it keeps malfunctioning because of the poor quality of pipes.<\/p>\n

In July, Ivanov was sentenced to 13 years in jail for embezzlement.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor leaving a metropolitan area of one million without water, one must be shot to death,\u201d the pro-Kremlin Russian commentator Dmitry Steshin wrote on Telegram in July, adding that the main subcontractor, Isaiah Zakharov, was found dead with signs of torture on his body near the canal in October 2024.<\/p>\n

Steshin also fell victim to untreated water while in Donetsk in August. He contracted keratitis, an eye infection caused by amoebas living in contaminated water.<\/p>\n

The lack of water has opened the floodgates of rare criticism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a drought. This is the government\u2019s systemic refusal to think strategically. This is corruption, indifference, stupidity and a lack of political will,\u201d local journalist Yulia Skubayeva of the pro-Moscow Bloknot publication in Donetsk wrote in July.<\/p>\n

Poisoned groundwater<\/p>\n

Before 2014, the city of Donetsk had a population of almost a million and was surrounded by giant metallurgical, processing and heavy-industry plants built on top of a cornucopia of coal, iron, manganese, rare metals and gold.<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, the Soviets designed a canal that took three years and 20,000 workers to build.<\/p>\n

The water from the Siversky Donets River was elevated by pumping stations, filtered and accumulated in four reservoirs.<\/p>\n

But since 2014, the canal has crossed the front line, and its key 28km-long (17-mile-long) section is a concrete pipe used by Russian soldiers as a hideout.<\/p>\n

Moscow and separatist leaders hope they can restore the canal once they occupy the town of Sloviansk<\/a>, a major Ukrainian stronghold that sits next to the Siversky Donets.<\/p>\n

But experts disagree.<\/p>\n

Even if Russian forces capture Sloviansk, the canal\u2019s restoration would take years, and Kyiv would thwart it any way it could, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany\u2019s Bremen University.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonetsk and the Donetsk region\u2019s entire centre will be on harsh water rations for at least the nearest decade without any guarantee that things will get better later,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Other experts said the drought is a combination of the region\u2019s industrial past and current negligence.<\/p>\n

The communal services system was \u201cdestroyed\u201d and hundreds of its employees have been forcibly mobilised, according to Pavel Lisyansky, who holds a doctorate in political science and heads the Strategic Research and Security Institute, a Kyiv-based think tank.<\/p>\n

He said some locals install coal stoves in their apartments and look for fuel in abandoned or illegal mines, sometimes dying of methane asphyxiation.<\/p>\n

Even more dangerous, the mining of coal and iron ore that the Kremlin spurred after 2022 causes tectonic cracks that swallow entire bodies of water, he said.<\/p>\n

The separatists stopped pumping water from abandoned mines, causing chemicals, heavy metal salts and methane to rise to the surface, poisoning groundwater, lakes and rivers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe area became a ticking environmental bomb,\u201d Lisyansky told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Radioactive isotopes may soon emerge in the water table, he said.<\/p>\n

In 1979,\u00a0the Soviet Union \u201cexperimentally\u201d blew up a nuclear bomb to prevent methane outbursts deep inside the Yunyi Kommunar coal mine.<\/p>\n

It sits 53km (33 miles) northeast of Donetsk, was closed down and flooded in 2018, and its protective capsule has been destroyed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore 2026, the contaminated water will mix with groundwater,\u201d warned Lisyansky, who worked as a coal mine engineer before 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 To extract water from tree leaves, branches are wrapped in a plastic bag for several…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[299,12,332,7661,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-533347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-russia","11":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","12":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115452111404680352","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}