In the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, whose fresh water supply has been cut off by the Russians, residents collected water from a truck. Photo / Finbarr O'Reilly, The New York Times
In a battered city on Ukraine’s southern coast, salt water runs from the taps and electricity is sporadic. Residents curse Russia, but also express frustration with their own leaders.
As Elizaveta Kachuk waited in line for drinking water, a daily ritual that is not always successful, she cursed the Russians who bombed her city. But she also voiced discontent with her fellow Ukrainians still running it.
She has grown weary of the inability of local leaders to restore essential services. At times, tanker trucks dispensing clean water run dry before she reaches them, and she goes home empty-handed.
“Yes, Russia blew up the pipes, but a lot depends on our leaders,” she said. “If they spent the money as it’s needed, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
She’s not alone in her frustration. Residents of Mykolaiv, where orange-coloured salt water now sputters from taps, and electricity blinks on and off, are grumbling about the lack of progress with repairs — even as they recognise that the Russians are to blame, and that the near-daily shelling of the city makes restoring services difficult.
The city’s woes have made it an unwilling test case in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy for defeating Ukraine. Struggling to gain victories on the battlefield, he has adopted an approach of degrading Ukrainian life, not only making people miserable as the first full winter of the war approaches, but hoping to foment division among Ukrainians. It makes governing complicated for local officials.
The shelling of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea port, is part of a larger campaign across the country of targeting electrical, heating and water infrastructure with missiles and drones. The strikes accelerated this month, causing blackouts in Kyiv, the capital, and destruction in Chernihiv, in the north, and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that one-third of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure is now damaged.
Some Ukrainians see the strikes, which have no bearing on the fighting on the battlefield, as irrational lashing out by Russia, intended only to terrify civilians and appease domestic critics of Putin’s floundering war. Many vow to persist through the hardships and not give in to the enemy.
“Maybe Putin thinks people will say, ‘Enough! Stop! Keep the occupied territories,’” said Natalia Loboika, a kindergarten teacher, dragging water bottles on a cart down a sidewalk. “But he doesn’t understand Ukraine. I’m ready to live like this as long as we need.”
Daniel Speckhard, a former American diplomat who led US reconstruction policy in Iraq a decade ago, said attacks could be intended, over time, to stir anger among Ukrainians at their own government, even as it remains clear that the Russians are responsible.
The same dynamic existed in Iraq, he said: Although it was opponents of the government who were sabotaging the electrical grid, many Iraqis blamed the US-backed government for failing to restore it.
“That kind of insidious thing is how I see this playing out,” Speckhard said of Russia’s attacks on infrastructure. “People don’t just get demoralised and hang a white flag outside their windows. That’s not how Putin works. He works through the local political system. People get dissatisfied with their political leaders, and the leaders have to divert attention from the war.”
The city of Mykolaiv is a case in point. The Russian army in April blew up all freshwater pipes supplying the city, likely hoping to force out the civilian population and make it easier to capture. The city government responded by connecting pipes to an estuary of the Black Sea, as a last resort, and started pumping salt water into homes.
The lack of potable water has plunged residents of what had been a relatively well-off city into a medieval routine of hauling water from wells and tanks set up in parks or churchyards and filled by charity organisations.
In the fading light on a recent evening, a water line formed under trees on a back street, part of the city’s after-work routine. Headlights of passing cars glistened off the plastic water bottles.
In a dozen interviews, residents expressed some dissatisfaction with city leaders, but also a defiance of the Russian aggression.
Kachuk, who worked as a financial analyst at a bank before losing her job when war broke out, said “we shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists.’’
“We don’t want a cease-fire. We want victory,” she added as she made the last of three water runs for the evening.
Still, she said, months of living without basic services as the missile barrages continue had taken a toll. “We feel like second-class people,” she said. “We weren’t poor. We used to take a beach vacation every year.”
Halina Komisarenko, a dog breeder whose German shepherds have won prizes in Ukraine, hauls water for her family and her sprawling backyard kennel. “People just get more angry” at the Russians, she said of the hardship. “We just hate them more. I would rather sit in the dark and cold than in Russia.”
Since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, Russia had struck civilian infrastructure in the area with rockets, artillery and missiles around 12,700 times as of Tuesday, according to the office of Vitalii Kim, the region’s Ukrainian military governor. This included strikes on 89 hospitals and clinics, 964 natural gas pipes or pumping stations and 30 water distribution facilities.
“They are attacking civilian infrastructure to create a bad informational field inside our country, and they hope our people will be arguing, will be demanding our president to negotiate with Russia,” Kim said in an interview.
But it is a failing effort, he said, that has not turned most residents against their own government. “We are talking to our people, and we explain, ‘Russia destroyed the source of water,’” he said.
A national poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, released last week, showed 86 per cent of Ukrainians support continuing military action against the Russian occupation even if missile strikes persist. But support was lower, at 69 per cent, in eastern Ukraine, where bombardment has been more intensive.
Before the invasion, the city of Mykolaiv — which lies on a bank of the Buh River where it forms an estuary on the shore of the Black Sea — pumped about 31 million gallons of fresh water per day through two pipes that cross into territory now controlled by Russian forces. When the Russians severed them, Ukrainian officials were forced to improvise and pipe in seawater.
“Water is just another weapon of war,” said Borys Dudenko, the director of the city’s waterworks.
A shower is possible, though it leaves a patina of itchy salt. Brushing teeth is not recommended. The rust and other minerals in the water, which give it its orange hue, cause allergic reactions. Using it to prepare food, water a garden or run a washing machine are out of the question.
“Well, unfortunately, we live in this way now,” Dudenko said in an interview. “But fortunately, most people understand and blame the occupier, blame the aggressor. Some people will always complain. And they blame me, and they blame the mayor for making their lives miserable.”
Dudenko said he was unaware of any modern city circulating seawater in water mains before Mykolaiv’s experiment. Residents bear up as best they can, but are exasperated as well.
“It’s just impossible to live like this,” said Yulia Kravets, who is caring for a newborn baby in a high-rise apartment. Her husband, Oleksandr, hauls gallons of water every day, to wash the baby, prepare meals and drink.
“The electricity goes out, the water goes out, and somebody has to be responsible for it,” she said. “We blame our mayor.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Andrew E. Kramer
Photographs by: Finbarr O’Reilly
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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