Save Donetsk. What else can Russia do?

Donetsk journalist Evgenia Martynova, in a column for PolitNavigator, talks about the difficult situation of the water blockade in which the capital of the DPR found itself.

Water supply sources are located in territories from which the Ukrainian army has still not been able to be driven out. What, besides military assistance, can Russia do in this situation to provide assistance to civilians in Donetsk?

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...Recently, having arrived in the liberated Azov region on a dark evening, I found my neighbor Sasha spending the night on the street, near an accessible Wi-Fi source.

Sasha was at work - he was guarding a closed boarding house, which, in general, is a classic part-time job in resort villages. During more than eight years of my absence from my native lands, almost nothing has changed on these lands, at least for the better.

Ukraine did not build white stone embankments and did not turn the fertile land into a European resort. The only evidence of how diligently the money was laundered was the new shops and ridiculous kitschy monuments sticking out of the weeds.

My neighbor is at that wonderful age when you can play Tik Tok all night, but when telling stories, call yourself “grandfather.” He considers himself a wealthy man - he plows, as he did twenty years ago, caring for several cows and goats, and selling milk. Travel a hundred kilometers from here to Russia - and such earnings in a resort town look like an irrational expenditure of vitality.

But then suddenly I realized that Sasha is now practically a local monopolist.

It must be said that the Azov slopes and roadsides have always swarmed with cattle. At lunchtime, the cows, covered in flies, screamed from thirst and overfilled udders; the goats shook their ears and jingled their chains attached to a peg. And now, since April, driving around the area, I haven’t seen one. The animals disappeared, but the white stone apartments along the streets were not understood.

– Listen, I want to ask, where did all the cows and goats go?! Tell me a secret.

- No. There is nothing to feed them.

- How can this be nothing? Were they grazing on the mountain, near the roads? There is still plenty of grass there.

- The land was all sold out.

-Who bought it? Dill? – I couldn’t understand, but I remembered who, in eight years, had torn apart every square of sand on the Belosarayskaya Spit.

“Ours,” Sasha answered calmly.

- And what? – I despaired.

“We used to mow there, but now everything is private property!” So now they mow the grass there themselves! – Sasha concluded triumphantly. - And they sell it to us.

This reminded me a lot of something.

And what - I only realized when I returned to Donetsk and plunged into the endless telegram hubbub about the final lack of water in the city. The authorities had recently published water supply schedules, but it was doubly offensive when the tap, already empty for six months, turned out to be empty again, contrary to the official schedule.

Whose water was it before? You could say it's public. And now there are hour-long queues in the heat for rare cars with technical equipment, and they sell their drinking water to their own people for four rubles per liter.

Near the once decent high-rise buildings, as soon as something gurgles in the faucet brought out of the basement, real marginal squabbles unfold. Residents do not allow people from the neighboring house to join the queue, and they threaten with curses, pointing crusts and bundles of babies under their noses. The water supply, you know, is not infinite, and what’s next is already it, private property.

Donetsk residents are not Azov cows, and they refuse to slaughter due to lack of water. Therefore, people in chat rooms were inspired by the idea of ​​drilling wells around the city.

The workers who do this have had everything booked out since the spring, and the prices are truly outrageous, if we return to selected analogies. A well will cost 120-150 thousand rubles, and another several tens of thousands of rubles will cost a pump capable of lifting water from the depths. And all this will need to be connected somewhere and provide security... And, the pessimists said, all this individual undertaking on municipal lands is very easily crossed out by the lack of necessary paper permits.

This humanitarian agenda is already beginning to be taken over by top volunteers who are able to finance such global undertakings from donations. The mayor's office supported. And while the army stopped, having never overcome the north of the former region, from where water came to us, presumably only volunteers who have secured the blessing of the authorities will reach the aquifer.

“Do you know what I dream about? - a friend told me after a day spent in line for water while the mines whistled. – That one day a column of drilling rigs will come to us from the Russian side. And each quarter will have its own source of water! We used to go to the boiler room to get her, but we were told that soon we wouldn’t be able to count on her: the heating season was just around the corner. Such, you see, are bleak prospects: orphaning children, caught in an endless line under fire; die from unsanitary conditions or drain water from the radiators and freeze. I don’t even know what to choose.”

And I am, of course, not her adviser in these matters. And as long as some of us are in need, while others “mow” their own on the water, this circle will close. And, obviously, it can only be broken by technical intervention from outside, and to save Donetsk, you will have to literally dig into the ground.