Kyiv, Ukraine – To extract water from tree leaves, branches are wrapped in a plastic bag for several hours. The evaporated liquid is drinkable after boiling.

That is not a survivalist tip, but a life hack from the Russia-occupied part of the parched Donbas region in Ukraine’s southeast that went viral in recent months.

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The majority of the region’s 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’s sophisticated water supply system, according to residents, Moscow-backed separatist authorities and Ukrainian officials.

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 “ticking environmental bomb”.

The most ‘complicated’ challenge

“We’re slowly dying of thirst,” Anna, a 29-year-old mother of two in the city of Donetsk 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.

“Instead of taking a bath or a shower, the kids wipe themselves with a wet cloth,” Anna said. “Donetsk is now [the] Sahara.”

Like any ex-Soviet megalopolis, Donetsk and its metropolitan area consist of apartment buildings with centralised water and heat supplies.

Since 2014, a wider area in the Donetsk region has been known as the separatist “People’s Republic of Donetsk”, or DPR, which Russia annexed in 2022 but retains symbols of independence such as a “cabinet” and a “parliament” that are, however, fully controlled by Moscow.

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’s full-scale invasion, which began in 2022.

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.

The situation painfully contrasts with pre-war Donetsk, which was filled with parks, fountains and countless beds of roses.

“The most difficult thing is the difference between what is now and what was before” 2014, a resident told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity. “It’s hard to get used to.”

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.

“It’s the colour of urine,” one subscriber wrote of the water.

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. One more subscriber warned that “even bottled water should be boiled [as] there are cases of cholera.”

Al Jazeera contacted 10 subscribers. Some did not respond while others refused to be interviewed.

A resident of Donetsk sent Kyiv-based expert Pavel Lisyansky this image, taken in recent months, of a body of contaminated water [Courtesy: Pavel Lisyansky]

While separatist officials have not announced infections, Ukraine has reported outbreaks of cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases.

“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 can leave leaves because it’s impossible to live there.”

The Donetsk residents Al Jazeera interviewed said they have nothing to flush their toilets with and resort to plastic bags to collect faeces.

(Al Jazeera)

“Normal people throw the bags in rubbish bins. Others throw them out of the window,” former Ukrainian lawmaker-turned-separatist Oleg Tsaryov, who fled to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt in 2023, wrote on Telegram in July.

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.

Separatist leaders have acknowledged the problem.

“Water levels fell critically. The reservoirs are practically empty,” the region’s “prime minister” Andrey Chertkov told the Russian RIA Novosti agency in July.

“Water supply is our most complicated and serious challenge,” Denis Pushilin, the Russia-installed leader of parts of the Donetsk region, told Russian President Vladimir Putin a month later.

In response, Putin admitted that the Russia-built canal from the Don River in southeastern Russia “doesn’t solve all problems”.

“It didn’t reach its planned capacity,” Putin said.

The meeting followed the release of a video in which several Donetsk children were seen urging Putin to restore the water supply.

“I believe that you are wise and strong, uncle president! Give us this simplest miracle – water in our homes!” a teenage girl said in the video, holding her right hand to her heart.

A dead subcontractor

Even if the canal reaches its “planned capacity”, Moscow’s failure to tackle the drought reflects its deeper problems with corruption, observers said.

Russian Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov oversaw the construction of the $2.45bn canal, which ended in 2023.

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. But it keeps malfunctioning because of the poor quality of pipes.

In July, Ivanov was sentenced to 13 years in jail for embezzlement.

“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.

Another image sent to expert Lisyansky from Donetsk shows a dried reservoir in the Donetsk region [Courtesy: Pavel Lisyansky]

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.

The lack of water has opened the floodgates of rare criticism.

“This is not a drought. This is the government’s systemic refusal to think strategically. This is corruption, indifference, stupidity and a lack of political will,” local journalist Yulia Skubayeva of the pro-Moscow Bloknot publication in Donetsk wrote in July.

Poisoned groundwater

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.

In the 1950s, the Soviets designed a canal that took three years and 20,000 workers to build.

The water from the Siversky Donets River was elevated by pumping stations, filtered and accumulated 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.

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

But 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.

“Donetsk and the Donetsk region’s entire centre will be on harsh water rations for at least the nearest decade without any guarantee that things will get better later,” he told Al Jazeera.

Other experts said the drought is a combination of the region’s industrial past and current negligence.

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 said some locals install coal stoves in their apartments and look for fuel in abandoned or illegal mines, sometimes dying of methane asphyxiation.

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.

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.

“The area became a ticking environmental bomb,” Lisyansky told Al Jazeera.

Radioactive isotopes may soon emerge in the water table, he said.

In 1979, the Soviet Union “experimentally” blew up a nuclear bomb to prevent methane outbursts deep inside the Yunyi Kommunar coal mine.

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

“Before 2026, the contaminated water will mix with groundwater,” warned Lisyansky, who worked as a coal mine engineer before 2014.