Turning water into war: Russia has created a humanitarian crisis in the Donbas

The current water crisis erupted this summer after the degraded infrastructure was further strained by heat and drought. Surviving reservoirs in the Donetsk Region dried up. Cracked mud flats appeared in place of the Khanzhenkivske reservoir near Makiivka. In Donetsk, water was supplied only once every three days; in Yenakiieve, the hometown of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, once every four.

The shortage reached such proportions that even “Novorossiya patriots” admitted its scale. Former Ukrainian MP-turned-separatist Oleg Tsaryov took to Telegram to describe the grim realities in Donetsk:

“In Donetsk, water comes once every three days. You can’t flush toilets. It’s normal here: people put a plastic bag in the toilet. The decent ones throw the bags in the trash. The rest dump them out their windows.”

Experts say Donbas has suffered droughts before, but today’s catastrophic crisis is not the result of natural phenomena, but of war coupled with administrative incompetence. “Natural conditions may be tough, but with resources and expertise the problem could have been solved. For Russia, these territories are trophies. Nobody will care about the people. Barbarism, lack of governance, lack of coordination — that’s the source of the crisis,” said Ukrainian environmentalist Vladyslav Antipov.

Ukraine’s fugitive ex-PM Mykola Azarov, now in Russia, implausibly blamed Ukraine for the drought: “Now Donbas has its usual dry weather with high heat. People are suffering from a humanitarian catastrophe, which, by the way, was orchestrated by Kyiv under orders from its Western masters.”

The situation has been aggravated by the incompetence of occupation officials, many of them Russian “parachuted managers” working on rotation, with little knowledge of the region or interest in understanding it. In 2022-23, the so-called DPR’s construction and housing ministry was run by Eduard Osipov, a former deputy chief of the Russian federal agency Centravtomagistral, which oversees the road network around Moscow. His number two was Andrei Nagaitsev, a former FSB officer and ex–deputy mayor of Biysk.

In 2023-2024, the post went to the ex-head of St. Petersburg’s construction inspectorate, Nikolai Tsiganov. He was succeeded by Donbas native Vladimir Dubovka, who had worked in housing services before 2014 but carried a dubious reputation: local bloggers claim he was linked to the crime boss Nesterov, the so-called “overseer” of Amvrosiivka. In 2014, Dubovka reportedly wore a T-shirt of the Ukrainian ultranationalist group Right Sector and voiced pro-Ukrainian views, but he later switched to the “DPR” in order to further his career. The region’s Ministry of Emergency Situations is run by Alexei Kostrubitsky, who is best known for his role in drunken public behavior.