The teenage girl addressed her appeal directly to the Russian leader.
“Uncle Vova, can you please bring a simple miracle into our lives and deliver water to our homes?” the girl pleaded in a video, using a nickname for President Vladimir V. Putin.
For more than a month, Donetsk, a regional capital of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, and its suburbs have been gripped by a severe water crisis, receiving running water just a couple of hours every three days.
The shortages demonstrate what Ukrainians have called Russia’s neglect of populations in territories it has seized. The Kremlin has focused on taking more land and using it as staging grounds for new attacks, while largely deferring reconstruction in areas devastated by fighting.
Those living in apartment blocks in Donetsk are chipping in to dig wells outside their buildings. Many others wait in long lines for municipal water tanks to arrive. Residents have been posting videos showing intricate arrangements for collecting rainwater or for using the toilet without running water.
“Neither me nor my neighbors or parents have seen water from the tap for a month now,” said Yaroslav, a 22-year-old man from a Donetsk suburb who like other residents interviewed asked that his last name be withheld to avoid repercussions from the Russian occupation authorities.
The problems began shortly after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and they have become acute in recent weeks. A crucial canal was destroyed in Russia’s offensive three years ago, and a spider’s web of pipes and dams now lies in ruins.
As the Kremlin demands that Ukraine hand over the sections of eastern Ukraine that Kyiv still controls as part of any peace deal, the emergency in Donetsk is seen by many Ukrainians as a cautionary tale for any future under Russian occupation.
The Russia-appointed authorities in the two-thirds of the Donetsk region under Moscow’s control have seized on the crisis to make the opposite argument. They say that taking over the rest of the region from Ukraine would allow Russia to restore the water supply. That includes the area around the city of Slovyansk, the source of water for the destroyed canal and a heavily fortified zone crucial to Ukraine’s defenses.
Russian officials have falsely asserted that Ukraine is imposing a “water blockade” in Donetsk and have blamed Ukraine for the dilapidated pipe network. These claims have been repeated on Russian state media.
Ukrainians who have fled the region say that Russia’s agenda in seeking to take the rest of Donetsk is reflected in its decision to allow the publicizing of open letters to Mr. Putin and the child’s video appeal asking for water to be restored. Officials in the occupied regions usually clamp down on any expression of dissatisfaction with Moscow’s rule.
“There’s clearly a reason the occupation authorities are pushing this issue,” said Anna Murlykina, a newspaper editor from Mariupol, a Ukrainian city under Russian occupation. She pointed to frequent statements by Denis Pushilin, the Russia-appointed head of the Donetsk region, about the need to capture Slovyansk.
The region’s prewar population of 4.4 million once relied on a complex network of pipes, pumping stations, dams and, crucially, the 82-mile-long Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal to bring water from water-rich Slovyansk in the northeast to the drier southeast.
That latticework has been dissected by a front line since Russia first entered Ukraine in 2014. But the water supply was uninterrupted for eight years, “crisscrossing this military and political divide,” said Sophie Lambroschini, a sociologist and historian at University Paris Nanterre who has researched the water supply in war-torn Ukraine.
“Both sides were dependent on that one network,” she said. “You couldn’t just cut it in two.”
In the first weeks of the full-scale 2022 invasion, water was intermittently cut in Donetsk and surrounding towns. The authorities initially were able to tap into a vast network of reservoirs, but those have since run dry.
“The whole water balance of the region has been completely upset by the war,” Dr. Lambroschini said.
In late July, the Russia-appointed authorities began speaking of an emergency in Donetsk, a city whose prewar population was just under one million.
Local television started to cover the crisis in detail, even citing officials who warned that the water crunch could shut down a power station providing one-third of the energy in the region. The issue was discussed when Mr. Pushilin, the Russia-appointed head of the region, had a rare meeting with Mr. Putin in early August at the Kremlin.
Whatever Mr. Pushilin’s argument for a Russian takeover of Slovyansk, the supply would take time to be restored because of the vast damage inflicted by Russian troops, Ms. Murlykina, the newspaper editor, said.
“Dams have been destroyed, and there is no canal,” she said. “It’s just not there. You will have to build it all from scratch.”
Beyond war damage, the water network suffered from underfunding during the first years of an unofficial Russian occupation that started in 2014, as well as from a current shortage of workers to maintain the system.
“Most of the men from the region were called up, including utility workers,” said Yaroslav, the 22-year-old from a Donetsk suburb, who himself was swept up in the mobilization drive.
As the water crisis has deepened, residents, long adapted to periodic power and water cuts, told of special arrangements in their homes. Yaroslav, who lives in a detached house, has installed a one-ton water tank on the property and paying about $50 per ton for supplies from a water truck.
Donetsk residents now put a plastic bag in their toilets and throw it away after using it, Oleg Tsaryov, a former Ukrainian lawmaker turned pro-Russian separatist leader, said in a Telegram post.
As residents soldier on, younger ones have been posting TikTok videos making fun of their own longing for running water and their wait for the “water day that never comes.”
Anastasia, a 19-year-old student, said her family waited for water to be delivered to fill up jugs and buckets that are kept on a balcony and in the kitchen to use later in dispensers.
She insisted that her family was managing the challenges. “We’re not upset,” she said. “We hope the water crisis will be resolved soon.”
Early in the current war, Russia started building a pipeline from the Don River in the south of Russia to the Donetsk region. The project was completed last year under the supervision of Timur Ivanov, a onetime Russian deputy defense minister who this year was given a 13-year sentence in a high-profile but opaque bribery case.
The pipeline has just a small fraction of the capacity of the prewar canal that brought water to Donetsk. Another pipeline is due online this year, but it will still fall far short of prewar supplies.
The water crisis has become so dire that even pro-Kremlin and pro-war figures have been denouncing the local authorities for “doing nothing since 2022,” when the canal was destroyed.
“It’s just hell out there,” a pro-war blogger, Tatyana Montyan, said in a video posted online.
Olha Konovalova and Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
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