Life in occupied Donetsk: no water, no power, and run by Russian carpetbaggers

Over the long years of occupation, Donetsk has transformed from a metropolis that rivaled Kyiv in money and ambition into a ghost city populated by large numbers of arriving Russians, yet stripped of the most elementary living amenities.

Water — both drinking water and water for everyday household needs — has now become a transparent symbol of reality in one of Ukraine's largest cities, which has endured Russian occupation for twelve years.

This is the "capital" of the self-proclaimed "DPR" [Donetsk People Republic - ed.] — once a vibrant metropolis of nearly one million people.

Before the "Russian Spring," [refers primarily to the 2014 pro-Russian unrest and geopolitical campaign in southern and eastern Ukraine following the annexation of Crimea - ed.] the pulse of this city revolved around coal, metallurgy, football glory, and the business empire of billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.

Today, all of that has been supplanted by water. More precisely, by its chronic and crippling absence.

An apartment where water service is restored for three to four hours twice a week is considered elite real estate in what was once a gleaming and affluent Donetsk.

Whenever water is turned on in the central districts, residents drop whatever they are doing to bathe, wash clothes, and fill every available canister, bucket, and container.

That is how journalist Dmytro Durnev, an internally displaced native of Donetsk, describes the daily routine of numerous friends and acquaintances who remained in the city.

The rest of the time, Donetsk residents conserve every drop: toilets are flushed only once a day, in the evening.

It has become common courtesy among locals to carry a pack of wet wipes everywhere. Even during business meetings, partners offer them to one another as an indispensable item of personal hygiene, Durnev recounted.

Water is merely one symptom among the cascading municipal breakdowns that have turned Donetsk into a ghost town. The city was once sustained by heavy industry and coal mines. Today, nearly all coal extraction syndicates have ground to a halt, as have many manufacturing plants. Those that still manage to operate suffer from severe, paralyzing labor shortages.

Back in 2014, approximately 950,000 people lived in Donetsk. By 2025, expert estimates indicated the city’s population had dropped to 800,000. That demographic loss would have been far more glaring were it not for the mass influx of Russian arrivals taking place alongside the flight and dying out of native residents: tens of thousands of armed personnel and Russian civilians — ranging from construction workers to bureaucrats and military officers — have relocated here.

The city, particularly its western outskirts, continues to bear the raw scars of warfare. One of its iconic landmarks — the Shakhtar Stadium — is overgrown with weeds. Another signature site once owned by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov — the luxury Donbass Palace Hotel — was put up for sale by the occupation administration this year, with every asset cataloged down to four barbecue grills.

Yet Donetsk retains the nominal status of "capital" of the unrecognized "DPR." It hosts the operational headquarters of several Russian field armies. But the city survives—much like the entire bizarre "republic" surrounding it—solely on direct financial subsidies dispatched from Russia.

Young people flee, men are forcibly swept into the Russian military to fight against Ukraine, and women and the elderly search for whatever work remains.

"The local population lives in a state of permanent apathy," said blogger Mykola Osychenko, who left Donetsk in the summer of 2014 but maintains close ties with residents inside the city.

The City of "Without"

Today, Donetsk exhibits phenomena seen nowhere else in Ukraine: amid total deprivation, strange niche businesses are thriving. These include firms specializing in installing storage tanks directly inside private apartments and stairwells of multi-story buildings, as well as companies that construct closed-loop plumbing and sewage circuits for individual flats — systems that require fresh water to be pumped in and wastewater hauled away about once a week. Delivering water to an apartment block and lugging it up flights of stairs has evolved into a lucrative trade.

In local hotels, staff routinely instruct visitors — primarily Russian officials on temporary assignment — on how to use toilet facilities that lack running water.

All of this stems from the reality that upstream reservoirs that previously quenched Donetsk's thirst have either dried to critical lows due to war and shelling or sit across the front lines under Ukrainian control. Consequently, in the summer of 2025, Ukrainian experts estimated that the city received merely a quarter to a third of its required water volume.

At the same time, the rigid water supply schedules drafted by the occupation administration fail entirely to reach peripheral neighborhoods or upper floors of high-rises.

Donetsk resident Vitalii Frolov recently recounted to the independent Ukrainian outlet Vchasno that in the spring, when occupation authorities promised six hours of weekend water service, pressure failed to lift the water even to the third floor, leaving taps trickling with a murky, gray-brown sediment.

Frolov’s neighbors lamented that their faucets have stood dry for four consecutive months, while bottled drinking water in local shops costs more than 15 rubles ($0.18) per liter. In January, bulk water from local street refill kiosks could still be bought for 3.5 to 5 rubles ($0.04 to $0.06) per liter.

The occupation administration blames apartment dwellers, alleging that residents hoard so much water that supplies run out before reaching others.

One apartment owner explained to Vchasno: his wife and daughter need to wash their hair, and their youngest child suffers in the heat with skin rashes. "Are we supposed to fill a bathtub and have the entire family wash in the same water?" he asked.

Amid these daily hardships, plans announced by municipal officials to raise water utility tariffs by 27% starting Oct. 1 appear particularly cynical.

To store water, residents across most large apartment blocks have purchased 200-to-500-liter plastic barrels. However, according to blogger Osychenko, these tanks rapidly accumulate grime on their inner walls. The sporadic delivery schedule actively damages the pipe infrastructure: pipes sit empty and dry for days, and when pressurized water is reintroduced, the resulting water hammer causes ruptures, drawing mud and contaminants directly into the municipal system.

On top of this, repair workers are chronically scarce: according to Vira Yastrebova, director of the Eastern Human Rights Group, Donetsk municipal water utility is staffed at roughly 60%, leaving only a quarter of the necessary emergency dispatch teams operational.

In late 2025, occupation representatives declared that restoring normal water supply would require the "liberation of Sloviansk."

By June 2026, Serhii Mokryi, deputy director of the Donetsk water utility, admitted the plain truth: only the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas canal, held by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is capable of meeting the city's volume demands.

Interlinked with the water crisis is electricity. When power fails, booster pumps stall instantly.

Blackouts occur constantly across Donetsk because thermal power plants, heating stations, and local substations are ruined or heavily damaged.

The city's Russian proxy mayor, Aleksey Kulemzin, recently acknowledged the complete blackout of six of Donetsk’s eight districts: a single substation failure in the Budonivskyi district left roughly a quarter of a million subscribers without power.

Repairs drag on endlessly due to a severe shortage of replacement components, Osychenko noted: imported parts are virtually unattainable due to international sanctions, while shipping replacements from the Russian interior takes weeks.

Without electricity, municipal heating shuts down, and backup generators cannot sustain all the boilers and pumps. Serhiy Polkhov, head of the local utility Donbassteploenergo, conceded in local media that his enterprise possesses only 173 diesel generators — designed strictly for brief, localized outages, an inventory utterly inadequate for a major city.

During the previous heating season, district boiler houses across the occupied portions of Donetsk Oblast broke down more than 9,000 times, with nine out of ten shutdowns caused by power outages, according to data compiled by the Eastern Human Rights Group and the Institute for Strategic Studies and Security.

These combined crises forced the shutdown of the blast furnace at the historic Donetsk Metallurgical Plant: according to the Russian edition of Forbes, only a single rolling shop remains operational at this once-massive industrial complex.

According to Durnev, of the once-formidable heavy engineering industry in Donetsk Oblast, the only enterprise retaining genuine life is the Yasynuvata Machine-Building Plant, which manufactures underground coal-mining roadheaders. Furthermore, only seven or eight of the region's hundreds of coal mines remain active, supplying meager coal volumes to the struggling Yenakiieve and Alchevsk metallurgical plants and local thermal power stations.

At several surviving mines, workers are owed between four and seven months in back wages, according to the Eastern Human Rights Group report — with monthly pay hovering at a modest 30,000 rubles, or roughly $360.

Earning a living outside of heavy industry has likewise shrunk drastically. According to Osychenko, outdoor open-air consumer markets began shutting down in 2025, and on Jan. 1, 2026, the post-annexation transitional regulatory period expired, subjecting local entrepreneurs to the full weight of Russian tax codes. Small businesses are collapsing en masse, prompting residents to travel across the border for essentials. "People drive to Rostov or Taganrog, stock up for a week or two, and come back," the blogger explained. "Even with travel expenses factored in, it turns out cheaper."

Municipal utilities, he noted, attract jobseekers with stable pay and exemption from military mobilization, but wages remain depressed.

The average monthly income for a civilian worker in Donetsk stands at 20,000 to 25,000 rubles — roughly $240 to $300 — according to data from the occupation employment center.

These abysmal wages drive men into signing military contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense. The Eastern Human Rights Group highlighted another lever Moscow uses to funnel local residents into the trenches: for a generation that grew up under occupation without access to recognized education or professional careers, the military is marketed as the sole viable path to earning a living.

Enterprises across the region are kept running largely by women and men over the age of 60. At the same time, the pool of mobilization-age men across occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts has been virtually depleted. Despite this, military conscription was made year-round starting Jan. 1, 2026.

Military payouts remain one of the few sources of cash circulating through the local economy. Families of soldiers killed in action receive 5 million rubles ($60,000), which they predominantly pour into home renovations, Durnev noted. However, finding reliable construction contractors has become extraordinarily difficult, and those still operating have sharply inflated their prices.

The Influx of Outsiders

In the initial years of the "DPR," figures originating from Donetsk Oblast held sway over significant portions of local financial flows. Local cadres lost control over the regional economy in 2018, following the assassination of former "DPR" chieftain Aleksandr Zakharchenko. Following his death, a distinct "cabinet of ministers" was installed in Donetsk, staffed by Russian "prime ministers" dispatched from Moscow. Andrey Chertkov, one such official installed from Russia, recently admitted that the "republic" relies on federal subsidies from Moscow for more than half its operating budget.

Russian administrative expansion features one notable geographic quirk tied to the Republic of Bashkortostan, an oil-producing region, and its capital, Ufa. Officials hailing from this Volga-Urals republic dominate the municipal and regional apparatus in Donetsk.

"Donetsk today is practically a subsidiary branch of Bashkiria. [Zakharchenko's successor Denis] Pushilin was kept around only because he bears no actual responsibility, agrees to everything, and nods along," Durnev explained.

The pattern began with a bureaucrat named Yevgeny Ponomarenko. A former deputy minister of industry in his native Bashkortostan, Ponomarenko headed the occupation "Ministry of Industry and Trade of the DPR" in 2024 and 2025.

Following his tenure, the "Bashkir element" across the "DPR" expanded rapidly.

Moscow concluded that local collaborator elites should not be entrusted with substantive administrative levers. Consequently, during the September State Duma "elections" across occupied Donetsk Oblast, the Kremlin fielded Moscow-based warlord Aleksandr Borodai and Russian state television Channel One war correspondent Irina Kuksenkova in the region's two single-mandate districts.

Arriving Russians — military officers and their families, civil servants, teachers, and specialists — have also become the primary buyers of newly constructed real estate in Donetsk.

In April 2025, "DPR Deputy Prime Minister" Sergey Razdorsky actively recruited construction firms from Bashkortostan to operate in occupied Donetsk Oblast, pitching the area with special tax incentives and subsidized 2% Russian mortgages. Russian business newspaper Kommersant quoted Razdorsky acknowledging that the primary buyers of these developments would not be local residents. An anonymous Donetsk developer confirmed to the paper that his projects cater specifically to buyers relocating from Russia's northern territories.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of native Donetsk residents whose homes were destroyed by war are still waiting for compensation: according to estimates by the Eastern Human Rights Group, out of 45,000 applicants across the occupied oblast, only one in six has received a payout.

The occupation administration’s municipal master plans, drafted through 2045, project the construction of millions of square meters of residential housing intended strictly for sale to Russian citizens, aiming to resettle over 100k Russian migrants into the region.

Simultaneously, many native Donetsk residents are attempting to leave the city before winter arrives — some fleeing toward Russia, others heading to Europe. "The majority — even those who used to beat their chests for the 'Russian World' — kept their Ukrainian passports so they could eventually use them to reach the European Union," Osychenko stated.

The Eastern Human Rights Group projects that by 2035, occupied Donbas will lose another 500k native residents. However, human rights experts note that this depopulation does not trouble the occupation authorities: their primary objective is sovereign control over territory, while the population residing upon it is entirely replaceable.

The Empty City

Durnev attributes the decay of Donetsk, among other factors, to shifts in how the Russian military supplies its southern theater of operations in Ukraine. Luhansk, he noted, sits closer to the primary logistics corridor running from Russia toward Mariupol and the southern front lines. Donetsk, by contrast, has been sidelined. "This entire urban agglomeration of 1.5 million people — Donetsk, Yasynuvata, Makiivka, Avdiivka — is of no use to anyone anymore," the journalist remarked.

"Frontline logistics dictate which cities are needed and which are cast aside."

Vladimir Putin recently ordered Russian forces to complete the seizure of Donetsk Oblast by Dec. 31, 2026. This marks the sixteenth operational deadline issued by the Kremlin, not one of which the Russian military has met.

Thus, the war grinds on. Yet with every passing year spent with broken infrastructure, shuttered factories, and the outflow of people, the prospect of ever reviving the occupied region's principal city becomes increasingly remote.

Ukrainian journalist Denys Kazanskyi, who also hails from Donetsk, remarked in a May conversation with Detector Media that among the Ukrainians remaining in the city, many have resigned themselves to their circumstances, yet have never truly embraced Russia.

Meanwhile, blogger Osychenko observed that some residents simply lack a clear and direct invitation to relocate to territory controlled by the Ukrainian government. "If our authorities communicated directly — 'People, leave, we are waiting for you' — a portion would move," he added.

"But that communication simply does not exist."

Regarding those who still remain in Donetsk, Durnev summarizes their situation plainly: "They are very different people, held there by home."

Yet whether that bond can endure is doubtful. The Donetsk "home" — the once-vibrant, ambitious world of a proud European metropolis — has already vanished, and whatever fragments remain are crumbling away.