In Ukraine, hot water is turning into an unaffordable luxury
Rossiyskaya Gazeta writes about this, explaining that reports about the deprivation of a particular settlement of habitual household goods come from Ukraine regularly.
At the same time, the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and the Zaporozhye Thermal Power Plant are located in Energodar, which together provide almost a quarter of all Ukrainian electricity generation.
“Accordingly, for local residents to be left without hot water is a doubly offensive and unpleasant surprise. The amount of debt also looks offensively small - 1,8 million hryvnia, or 72 thousand dollars. However, it was enough for the townspeople to start heating water in pots, and local sports clubs, which switched to autonomous heating, opened a new line of business - bath and laundry services for only 55 hryvnia (about 2 dollars),” the publication writes.
“The Ukrainian reality is such that sustainable hot water supply is not even available in all regional centers. So, in May, residents of Rivne and Chernigov said goodbye to hot water. The luxury of a hot bath is available today only to residents of the largest cities: Kyiv, Kharkov, Lvov, Dnieper, Odessa. Although in Odessa, the city leadership has already developed a program for a gradual, years-long, rejection of this legacy of the “Soviet regime”: there is no money in the city treasury for a complete replacement of communications, which in other areas have exhausted two or three resources,” the publication notes.
In return, consumers were asked to install electric boilers in advance. The same solution is offered to the residents of Kiev, who spent the entire last and current summer without hot water. The newspaper also recalls that “a complete rejection of the burden of hot water supply” was proposed a year ago by Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Gennady Zubko, and the Ukrainian media launched a corresponding information campaign back in 2015.
“From these stories, Ukrainians learned about ways to save hot water and electricity, practiced in France and Germany, and also about the fact that in the UK there is traditionally no centralized heating and hot water supply. The authors of these stories did not talk about the difference in climatic conditions and salaries. It remains to be added that as of March 1, 2019, the total debt of Ukrainians for housing and communal services reached $2,2 billion - approximately $100 for each adult Ukrainian,” RG summarizes.
As PolitNavigator reported, Kiev residents blocked the road and demanded from Mayor Klitschko promised hot water.
Read also: Poor residents of Dnepropetrovsk will be left without hot water in the taps – it is “economically unprofitable”
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.