Ukraine’s Kyiv: Branch wrappers are placed in plastic bags for several hours to extract water from tree leaves. The evaporated liquid is drinkable after boiling.
The Russian-occupied Donbass region in the southeast of Ukraine has recently become a viral survivalist tip, not a survivalist tip.
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Residents, separatist leaders, and Ukrainian officials believe that the majority of the region’s 3.5 million people are suffering from a worsening man-made drought after years of shelling have destroyed the region’s sophisticated water supply system.
Meanwhile, uncontrolled mining is contaminating the remaining water sources with methane, carcinogens, and radioactive isotopes. Experts have warned that the Donbas has turned into a “ticking environmental bomb”.
The most “complicated” problem
We’re slowly dying from thirst, Anna, a mother-of-two from the Donetsk city, told Al Jazeera.
She withheld her last name because contacts with foreign media could land her in a detention centre, where people have reported torture and killings.
The kids use a wet cloth to wipe themselves instead of bathing or showering, Anna said. “The Sahara has come to be known as Donetsk.”
Like any ex-Soviet megalopolis, Donetsk and its metropolitan area consist of apartment buildings with centralised water and heat supplies.
The separatist “People’s Republic of Donetsk,” or DPR, was established in the Donetsk region in 2014, but it still possesses symbols of independence, including a “cabinet” and a “parliament,” which are, however, entirely under Moscow’s control.
Before 2014, there were 6.5 million people living in Donbass, of which Donetsk is a part. Almost half are believed to have fled the separatist uprising 11 years ago and Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began in 2022.
Residents only had running water for a few hours per week for the majority of 2025. Similar issues have been present in the neighboring Luhansk region, which is under separatist control, in recent months.
The situation painfully contrasts with pre-war Donetsk, which was filled with parks, fountains and countless beds of roses.
Under the condition of anonymity, a resident told Al Jazeera, “The most challenging thing is the difference between what is now and what was before.” It’s challenging to re-establish.
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. Users of the channel don’t criticize local officials or Moscow, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to be run by separatists.
One subscriber described the water as “the color of urine.”
Another said water pressure was high enough for a couple of hours to start a washing machine, but somebody else complained that his district “didn’t even get a drop” in a week. Another subscriber urged caution when boiling “even bottled water” because of the prevalence of cholera.
Ten subscribers were contacted by Al Jazeera. Some did not respond while others refused to be interviewed.
Although separatist officials have not made any announcements regarding infections, Ukraine has reported cases of dysentery, cholera, and other water-borne illnesses.
“There are horrible stories caused by the water crisis”, Petro Andryushchenko, a former mayor of the Russia-occupied Donetsk city of Mariupol, said in televised remarks in mid-September. Anyone who wishes to leave leaves because it is impossible to live there.
The Donetsk residents who were interviewed by Al Jazeera claimed they have nothing to use to collect faeces and use plastic bags to empty their toilets.
“Normal people dispose of the bags in the trash.” Former Ukrainian lawmaker-turned-paratist Oleg Tsaryov, who fled to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt in 2023, wrote on Telegram in July that “others throw them out of the window.”
Residents are also afraid about the winter. The central heating systems won’t function without water, but it will bring some potentially melted snow for drinking.
Separatist leaders have acknowledged the issue.
“Water levels fell critically. The region’s “prime minister,” Andrey Chertkov, told the Russian agency RIA Novosti in July that the reservoirs are essentially empty.
A month later, Denis Pushilin, the leader of some of the Donetsk region under Russian rule, declared to Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Water supply is our most complicated and serious challenge.”
In response, Putin admitted that the Russia-built canal from the Don River in southeastern Russia “doesn’t solve all problems”.
According to Putin, “It didn’t reach its planned capacity.”
Following the release of a video in which several Donetsk children were seen urging Putin to restore the water supply, the meeting took place.
“I believe that you are wise and strong, uncle president! Give water in our homes, the simplest miracle! holding her right hand to her heart, a teenage girl said in the video.
A dead subcontractor
Moscow’s failure to deal with the drought reflects its deeper problems with corruption, according to observers, even if the canal “reaches its “planned capacity.”
The $ 2.45 billion canal project, which ended in 2023, was overseen by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov.
The maximum capacity is 350, 000 litres (93, 000 gallons) of water a day – only a third of what the city of Donetsk alone needs. However, due to the subpar quality of the pipes, it keeps failing.
Ivanov received a 13-year prison sentence for embezzlement in July.
“For leaving a metropolitan area of one million without water, one must be shot to death”, 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.
Steshin also experienced water poisoning while visiting Donetsk in August. He contracted keratitis, an eye infection caused by amoebas living in contaminated water.
Rare criticism has been levied as a result of the lack of water.
“This is not drought,” he said. This is the government’s systemic refusal to think strategically. Local journalist Yulia Skubayeva of the pro-Moscow Bloknot publication in Donetsk reported in July that this is corruption, indifference, stupidity, and a lack of political will.
groundwater that has been poisoned
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.
A canal was constructed by the Soviets in the 1950s, which spanned 20 000 workers and three years of construction.
Pumping stations raised the Siversky Donets River’s water, filtered it, and bottled it in four reservoirs.
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.
Once they occupy the town of Sloviansk, a significant Ukrainian fortification that borders the Siversky Donets, separatist leaders and Moscow hope to reclaim the canal.
However, experts disagree.
Even if Russian forces capture Sloviansk, the canal’s restoration would take years, and Kyiv would thwart it any way it could, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.
Without any guarantee that things will improve in the future, he told Al Jazeera, “Donetsk and the Donetsk region’s entire center will be on harsh water rations for at least the next ten years.”
Other experts believe that the drought is the result of the area’s past industrial practices and current carelessness.
The communal services system was “destroyed” 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.
He claimed that some locals search for fuel in abandoned or illegal mines and install coal stoves in their apartments, sometimes passing away as methane asphyxiation.
He claimed that the Kremlin’s coal and iron ore mining, which it started after 2022, causes tectonic cracks that swallow entire bodies of water, making matters even more dangerous.
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.
According to Lisyansky, “The area turned into an environmental bomb.”
He claimed that the water table may soon contain radioactive isotopes.
In 1979,  , the Soviet Union “experimentally” blew up a nuclear bomb to prevent methane outbursts deep inside the Yunyi Kommunar coal mine.
It was shut down and flooded in 2018, and its protective capsule was destroyed, and it is located 53 kilometers (33 miles) northeast of Donetsk.
Source: Aljazeera
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