Crimea’s Water Crisis Is an Impossible Problem for Putin

Mar 25, 2021 | Clara Ferreira Marques
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A water emergency in Crimea is absorbing billions of taxpayer rubles as Russia tries to patch up an impossible problem stemming from the peninsula’s annexation in 2014. President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea gem looks increasingly like a millstone.

Ukraine dammed the North Crimean Canal seven years ago, cutting off the source of nearly 90% of the region’s fresh water and setting it back to the pre-1960s, when much was arid steppe. Add a severe drought and sizzling temperatures last year, plus years of underinvestment in pipes and drilling, and fields are dry. In the capital Simferopol and elsewhere, water has been rationed.

Tiny Crimea gave Putin a boost, when, following protests that overthrew Kyiv’s Russia-friendly government, he seized a territory that belonged to Moscow for centuries but had been part of an independent Ukraine since 1991. The annexation of the territory that’s equal to less than 0.2% of Russia’s total helped lift Putin’s national popularity to record levels in the year or so that followed. That bump has since faded.

Today locals, who were made ambitious promises in 2014, are struggling with the fallout from a wide-ranging nationalization drive that's not always served their interests, a poorly handled, muffled coronavirus crisis — and dry taps. Sanctions-inflated prices, high even after a $3.7 billion bridge over the Kerch Strait linked the territory to Russia, have meanwhile eaten away at pension and salary increases. Opinion polls are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence reveals building frustration.