Water and Ukraine. An Old System for a New Reality

So the question today is not only how to repair damaged pipes. The question is far broader: what should Ukraine’s water system look like after the war?

The destruction of the Kakhovka dam was the clearest proof that water infrastructure is national security infrastructure. After the disaster, more than 700 thousand people were left without access to water. The loss of the Kakhovka reservoir created risks for the water supply of southern and central regions, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection estimated the ecological damage at almost €4 billion.

But Kakhovka is only the most visible part of the problem. Water mains, pumping stations and treatment facilities are being destroyed. Water supply depends on electricity, so an attack on the energy system can very quickly become a water crisis. This confirms once again: energy and water are not two separate systems.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to explain the current situation solely by Russian aggression. The war struck a system that already had accumulated problems: old networks, technologically outdated treatment facilities, water losses, high energy intensity and enormous inequality of access. The difference between city and village is particularly telling.

According to the National Report on Drinking Water Quality, in 2023 14.3% of samples tested from centralised water supply sources failed to meet sanitary and chemical standards, and 4.3% failed on microbiological indicators. In rural water systems the situation was even more difficult: 28.9% and 11% respectively.

But there is one more fact which, in my view, characterises the scale of the problem very precisely. In 2024, Deputy Minister of Health Maryna Slobodnichenko stated that if Ukraine were to introduce drinking water requirements now, as the EU demands, then by those criteria the water in the country would be considered not drinking water but technical water. In other words, it is not enough simply to rewrite the standards – the system must be physically brought into line with them. Put differently, this is another critical point of our European integration.

From water intake and treatment – to the networks through which water reaches the consumer.

So simply restoring the old system means restoring the old problems. After the war there will be an enormous temptation to act the easiest way: to replace the destroyed infrastructure with new infrastructure – in the form in which it was technologically designed before, just with different equipment. That is understandable. But strategically wrong.

If we invest billions in reproducing the technological model of the last century, we will get new infrastructure with old logic. In the water sector we need energy-efficient pumping equipment, modern treatment, automated quality and consumption control, reduced losses, backup power supply, and local sources where the centralised system is too vulnerable.

And, which is especially important to me, – water reuse. Water that can be treated and returned to an industrial, agricultural or municipal cycle should not automatically become waste after a single use. This is exactly the circular logic we work on at Green Innovation Lab.

Water and the demand for it are distributed unevenly across Ukraine. The South is particularly vulnerable – critically important for agricultural production and at the same time naturally limited in water resources. The destruction of the Kakhovka system made this contradiction even sharper. That is why the future of Ukraine’s South cannot be planned separately from water.

What kind of agriculture will be economically viable there? What should irrigation systems look like? Where will water for cities and industry come from? How many times will we be able to reuse it? This is no longer a question for a single water agency. This is a question of the region’s future economic model.

We should also understand that climate change will remain a challenge going forward. The war has understandably pushed it off the front pages of Ukraine’s agenda. But the physical processes have not stopped because of that.

Droughts, changes in river flow, depletion of underground aquifers and the degradation of small rivers mean one simple thing: the future water system cannot be designed with the climate of the past in mind. We need water storage, protection of underground aquifers, modern irrigation, restoration of aquatic ecosystems and the reuse of treated water.

Ukraine is already moving towards the European model of water management – by river basins rather than administrative borders. The government has approved nine river basin management plans for 2025-2030. They cover 9,173 surface water bodies and 173 groundwater bodies and are part of the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive. This is the right logic.

In my view, we need to change the very framing of the question. Ukraine needs resilience – backup sources of water and energy, local solutions capable of working when large systems are damaged. We need efficiency – we cannot spend energy on treating water only to lose it in inefficient infrastructure. We need circularity – treated wastewater should become a resource for industry, the agricultural sector and technical needs. We need quality and control – digital monitoring and a gradual transition to European requirements. And we need basin management – managing water as a natural system rather than as a set of administrative territories.

In essence, we face a choice. Rebuild the old model of water management in new pipes? Or use the recovery to build a modern system – energy-efficient, digital, circular, sufficiently decentralised and resilient to war and climate change? For me the answer is obvious. I think it is obvious to anyone who wants long-term development for our country.

In my previous piece I wrote that energy, water, land and food are not four separate worlds. They are one system. The war taught us to speak about energy security in very concrete terms. It is time to treat the water sector just as seriously. Not as a utility service. And not even only as an environmental resource. But to speak of it as one of the basic systems of the state’s resilience.