When I planned my first trip to Mykolaiv in 2023, I had to overcome my fear. Most “non-military” people travel to the unpredictable and unstable frontline zone only to see family, close friends, or the places of their childhood. Familiarity with the area, and the memory of what it was before the war, makes it possible to imagine such a trip. It is as if the war were not a war at all but a strange, ancient plague, and it is only feasible to visit someone who has contracted the plague when you remember them as a whole, healthy person. Remembering does not guarantee survival, but it creates something to hold onto—an imagined space where “civilian” life feels larger, more solid, than war itself.

Still, I put off the trip for weeks because I couldn’t figure out the trains. I planned to stay in Mykolaiv for only a few days, but there were no return tickets available. The trains didn't run every day, and images of shelled train stations flickered in my mind. All exits from the city could suddenly close at any time. And then my next thought: “I don't know anyone there!” What would I do? These are the kinds of anxieties we don’t speak about anymore. They seem out of place, off-limits in the “rules of everyday life in war,” where fear is only acceptable in connection with immediate danger.

In early 2023, I spoke with a friend, a human rights activist, about the cities along the frontline. He seemed shaken as he spoke about Mykolaiv: “You have to go there!” he said. “It's a rare thing: a city almost without drinking water! Some districts go days without it, and then when it does come out of the tap, it’s saltwater, which leaves your hands so sticky that you feel you haven’t rinsed them at all. The water problem makes every part of life so hard. And it’s right there on the front, near Kherson. They’re shelling Mykolaiv non-stop.”

Some of my family come from Mykolaiv, and so I had passed through it once before the war and, as he spoke, I tried to summon the city I had seen. But, as often happens, my memory did not obey my command. I remembered a pedestrianized zone in the city center, full of young people in the summer. The memories delivered something postcard-perfect: people laughing, buying ice cream, music on every corner. Beyond that, my attempts to remember broke off, only the theoretical conclusion remained, that Mykolaiv was no longer the well-known, open southern Ukrainian city, where people would spend weekends and have fun before the war. To summarize: here was the lazily flowing life of a provincial southern city, which, although industrial, wanted to become a tourist hotspot, as it were.

Yet Mykolaiv, with its tangled industrial and post-industrial history, is not only one of the focal points of the Russian-Ukrainian war: it was one of the first cities to experience a war against its very infrastructure. I mean that aspect of the war which in any local case can turn into a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe, because infrastructure touches on all aspects of life in the city. It is now obvious that an infrastructure war is being fought against all large cities in Ukraine, but in Mykolaiv it has been more thorough and far-reaching. Long before other cities, Mykolaiv’s water system was deliberately attacked and, by spring 2022, the drinking water supply for its half-million residents was gone.

“Water is a weapon”

Boris Dudenko, the general director of Mykolaiv Vodokanal, the city’s water supply company, received me in his office, which is reserved for meetings. I had interviewed him a year earlier, in September 2023,and as I switched on my dictaphone this second time, I found myself less focused on his words than on the differences between this interview and the last.

The conversation was far from coherent. There was no story, no narrative to the waterworks, and the situation was hardly any different from before: “The problem has not yet been solved. But we’re looking for creative, unexpected solutions. And we have supplied the city's inhabitants with drinking water in the short term.”

On the table in front of the director lay “heritage artifacts”—fragments of rusty Soviet pipes. The saltwater in the water system had eaten away at the metal. The pipes had been bolted there, labeled like specimens in a museum. In the corner of the room stood another pipe, a heavy, wide model. It had rusted through, eaten away until it looked moth-eaten, torn, more fabric than metal. These objects were relics of collapse, each a small obituary for a section of pipe and the people it served.

One of the maintenance workers tried to explain: “We have seven, ten or twelve emergency calls every day. Sometimes more. Every day we dig holes, replace sections of pipe, and bury them again. Do you understand? It's impossible. And we're short on people—everyone is being carted off. How can I even explain it?”

By “carted off,” he meant drafted and sent to the front. He tried to describe the endless grind of his work, but a helpless anger seemed to overtake him. How do you convey the desperation of trying to keep something as vast and essential as a water system alive? Water, like electricity and infrastructure as a whole, is supposed to remain invisible. It is the foundation on which everything more noticeable—everything more “important”—is built. Only when it collapses does it come into focus. But even then it remains difficult to talk about, as if it falls apart somewhere in the field of collective muteness—of the silent effort holding the shared life of the city together.

The war in Mykolaiv began on the night of February 24, 2022. I found out about the war at 9 a.m. that day—my cousin called me. The people of Mykolaiv had been woken in the night by shelling. For twelve days, from March 12 to 24, the fighting took place in the city itself. Russian artillery moved close, houses burned down, people were killed on sidewalks and in doorways. By March 24, the Russian army had been pushed back to the border of the Mykolaiv administrative region.

And then on March 29 came what was likely an act of revenge: a rocket attack on the Mykolaiv regional administration building. At that time the photo looked like the evidence of some unnatural act. It was as if a huge pair of jaws had bitten a piece out of the central building. A wave of the hand, and a structure gone, the city administration, as if made of paper, torn apart. An act of destruction in the name of victory and dominance, thirty-seven people killed, thirty-three injured. All these people, for some reason, were in the building during the rocket attack.

I remember that when I saw the photo of this destruction in March 2022, I immediately started to cry. Was this a childish reaction? Helplessness? Emotions are no longer spoken about because they affect nothing—they only show an unwelcome weakness. But I was crying for the people killed by chance, and because of the very idea of the murder as “punishment,” “persuasion,” “compulsion,” and “warning.”

Or perhaps because of my fear that human life would soon be worth very little not only to “them,” but to “us?” Because this demonstration of the capacity to destroy life seeks to be a worldwide spectacle and a media phenomenon. It will shock everyone who follows the new war either in horror or with enthusiasm, and it seeks to influence.

In front of me I beheld a kind of monument to war, a gaping wound in the building. It was a large-scale promise of the war to come.

In a way, this building seemed a validated ticket, “admitting” us to a situation controlled by forces beyond the will of any single person to stay alive, or preserve the lives of others. Forces powerful enough to render the lives of both friends and enemies equally insignificant.

From that moment, the shelling continued and, by June 2022, over five hundred city residents had been injured and more than a hundred killed in Mykolaiv.

It was on April 12, 2022 that the drinking water in Mykolaiv disappeared and it has been scarce ever since.

At the waterworks, the general director leans over the table and tries to make the sentence he has repeated many times over sound convincing rather than trite: “They started to besiege the city by cutting off the water. They wanted the city to fall. Epidemics would have broken out here. People would have left the city in panic.”

Now the townspeople are certain: before the war, Mykolaiv had the best drinking water in Ukraine. I heard it often, sometimes with emphasis on every syllable: “Just imagine, you could drink our water straight from the tap!”

The Russian army blew up the water pipeline in several places. The pipes, laid above ground, were easy targets. They stretched from Kherson Oblast to Mykolaiv Oblast, alongside an irrigation canal that Russian units made into a trench. From there they shelled the nearby village of Posad-Pokrovskoye.

And now, from these canals, if you stand where the pipeline was destroyed and look toward Mykolaiv, you can see the broken roofs and walls of villages on the horizon.

At first, no one believed the water supply had been destroyed on purpose. The director of the waterworks thought it was an accident: “Only later, when negotiations with the other side to repair the pipe failed, did we understand the truth. The city had been deliberately cut off.”

And then he repeated himself: “Water has become a weapon! Everywhere I go, I say that our city was besieged, and water was the weapon!”

We tried, briefly, to compare this to the sieges of medieval cities. But the comparison felt inadequate. This war seemed full of echoes, quotes from older wars, but these references explained nothing.

After the pipes were destroyed, Mykolaiv went without water for days. Fetching water became dangerous; Russian artillery was too close. The air raids made it impossible.

The city adapted. The waterworks team and private initiatives began digging artesian wells, in front of which long lines formed. Truckloads of water arrived from Odesa, Kyiv, Dnieper, Zaporizhia. Bottles, cisterns, brought by volunteers in cars, by train. Of course, there was still not enough, and residents had to turn to rivers, trying to purify the water themselves, with those furthest away from the river or canal facing the greatest challenge.

Negotiations were held with Russia about a possible restoration of the water supply. The Russians offered to clear a road for the repair brigade, but would fire upon them as soon as they approached. The pattern repeated itself: an invitation to the workers, a repair vehicle loaded with equipment, a sense of hope, and then a sudden shelling—then the vehicle turning around and returning to Mykolaiv again and again without result. It resembled a war game, some kind of “military ruse” from a naive Soviet movie.

At the same time, articles appeared in Russia claiming that the Ukrainian army had destroyed the water supply system in order to “surrender” Mykolaiv to Russia. As if a city were a matter of dispute that could only be handed over to a stronger party after it had been thoroughly damaged.

By the end of April, the water system itself could not be allowed to stand empty; the city administration had to pump in salt water from the Dnieper-Bug estuary to prevent the failure of the sewage system, without which Mykolaiv, and its several hundred thousand inhabitants, would face the spread of epidemics in the hot summer months.

One could not even wash food with it, but it was still vitally important. One woman told me that she opened the tap several times a day just to make sure there was water.

And so at first, there was no water at all. Then came saltwater from the Liman, and about a year later, a new solution emerged—water from a source that cannot be disclosed—less salty, but still far from drinkable.

In order for the city to continue to exist, the issue of drinking water had to be addressed. International assistance (from the Red Cross, missions from individual countries, international organizations and businesses) helped to set up small reverse osmosis water purification systems in each district. Today, these stations dot the city, bearing logos or state flags. It seems water, on Mykolaiv’s streets, is diplomacy itself, a kind of state representation.

The Russians continue to launch rocket attacks, targeting high-voltage lines, the transformer station, and the power plant, which is responsible for hot water and heating Mykolaiv. When the power goes out, the reverse osmosis stations stop. In turn, in apartment buildings, where people go down to the street to fetch water with empty canisters, the elevators stop—and all water again stops.

Every day, there is no electricity for hours on end in every district, in every quarter of the city. Those without water walk and drive to other neighbourhoods in the hope of finding electricity and water. Passers-by often ask me if I have seen a queue for water anywhere. If there is a queue, it means that there is also electricity and you can fill your bottles with water.

“If there’s no water, no power, no elevator,” one woman told me, “it’s like I don’t exist. Nobody needs me. My work isn’t needed. They’ve given up on us.” She laughed as she spoke. “Everyone here has to prepare for winter alone. Everyone talks about winter. That’s how it is. We all have to work out how to keep our apartments warm without electricity or heating. I really can't think of anything. I'll probably leave my door open for the neighbors. My cousins won’t know what to do, they’ll have even less of a clue than I will.” And then she laughed again.

When the city’s infrastructure disappears, the loss feels intimate, personal. Someone I was speaking to, grasping for words, finally said, “It’s like being forbidden to read books. Forbidden to live!” She was exaggerating, of course, but I understood her. She was trying to explain how strange life becomes under this constant uncertainty, how hard it is to adjust to a reality where electricity and water can vanish at any moment.

In the hotel where I was staying, the power went out one evening. The entire district went dark. My phone’s battery was almost dead, and I used a flashlight to feel my way through the windowless corridors to my room. Salty water flowed from the tap, enough to wash my hands, and I connected the phone to a power bank. During the blackouts, the internet gradually disappears. At first there is still mobile service, but after half an hour, even that fades until it’s too weak to use.

It quickly grew dark. The gray gloom of the hotel room made me tired. The glass of my cell phone shimmered on the bedspread. If I ran my finger over the glass, I could see the green battery charging greedily. Soon I would be able to call someone, and the feeling of being cut off from the whole world that permeated the darkness would dissipate.

In Mykolaiv, I realized that I didn't want to record these fragmentary impressions. I was only able to write when I understood that I was not describing my own reality, but a fantastic scenario, a fiction.

The most difficult thing is to overcome the desire to remain silent, to say nothing. Propaganda clichés are also a form of concealment. Silence seems to protect you. From what? From weakness, from vulnerability and the unpleasant truth that the final picture of reality is not unified but fragmented.

It is war that claims to be unambiguous: it thrives on the illusion of the “black and white,” on decisions “without alternatives,” on the idea that “there is and can be no other way out.”

By contrast, describing reality makes it seem tangible and material and in need of urgent solutions. But inertia drives this war. In the media, it is dominated by the ideal image of the fight against absolute evil. Reality, from the standpoint of political ideology, seems to be unimportant, uninteresting. While reality is studiously ignored, Ukrainian cities are destroyed one after the other.

“Negotiations”

In a suburb of Mykolaiv, someone has carved the word "negotiations" into a wall. After 2014, you would often heard a hopeful refrain: “real negotiations will happen soon.” The closer you got to the frontline before 2022, the louder the hopes and even the anger, grew. Why was Ukraine not using diplomatic means to fight for peace and the lives of people in frontline areas?

But after the Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region in spring 2022 and the crimes in Butsha, Irpin, Borodyanka and Makaryiv were discovered, the idea of “negotiations” not only disappeared from the public eye, it became taboo.

Now, in the third year of the war, people speak about negotiations in whispers, but are still afraid of being heard. That one word scrawled on the wall is an exception, a quiet act of defiance against what remains unspoken. If someone in Mykolaiv were to admit to me that they still hoped for negotiations, it would be an extraordinary expression of trust. And it became my responsibility to protect those who made such admissions, to never name names. To shield them from the suspicion that they might be unpatriotic—or worse, dangerous.

Context

The first water pipeline was laid in Mykolaiv in 1904, and has been rebuilt several times since. The modern facilities came in the 1950s, while the sewage treatment plants were designed in the late 1960s and began operations in 1973.

Almost all of the plants I visited contained relics of Soviet design—decorative plaster with Soviet stars, characteristic industrial lampshades—all of which are in Ukraine today. Yet here they lingered, preserved, in closed industrial zones at constant risk of bombing.

The goal of the Russian bombardment is not complete, abrupt destruction but attrition: a state of permanent crisis, like a chronically ill patient—not dying, but in constant need of resuscitation.“Everyday life,” whose most basic requirement is the uninterrupted supply of water and electricity, should feel unattainable.

Cultural changes have crept into the city as the war has dragged on. All advertisements, all surfaces, signs, names of stores and service areas, which used to be mostly in Russian, have been replaced with Ukrainian ones. Monuments have been demolished, Soviet-era facades dismantled piece by piece, and now it is only in the ruins of bombed-out buildings, that traces of Russia remain.

Within the waterworks, workers came up to me several times and asked me not to photograph these traces of the past: “They'll come here and destroy everything. Leave it alone, it doesn't bother us.” Someone said to me: “they’re destroying everything now, inside and out.”

Photographing Soviet industrial design carries its own risks, but photographing the water stations themselves and the surrounding industrial zones is even more perilous. In 2023, members of an international group of journalists ignored warnings from waterworks employees and shared images of industrial sites on social media. The following day, every site they had visited was bombed.

For eight decades, Mykolaiv's drinking water has flowed from a pumping station on the Dniester River near Kherson. Situated in a Ukrainian-controlled area adjacent to occupied territory, this station is manned by dedicated workers. Daily Russian shelling hampers repair efforts; one of the staff was recently wounded. Despite these challenges, they continue to repair all the damaged pipelines. Should the Russian bombardment stop, the city's drinking water supply could be reinstated within a week.

Raid

“I’d like to show you the city,” a cab driver told me. “The bombed-out houses. All of it. Drive you around. That would be good. That would be interesting. Meet the people. But I can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“We're in the middle of the raids. One after the other. Raids (облавы) - do you understand?” He repeated the word as if insulted by my ignorance, his tone almost childlike, offended. It felt like something had been taken from him—a work assignment, the chance to show me his city.

I pressed him to explain, though I already had an idea. He said nothing more, as if my questions had fallen into silence.

The word raid reminded me vividly of Isaak Babel's collection of stories from Odessa: “‘A new broom sweeps well,’ said Benja Krik. ‘And when will the raid be, King?’ ‘Tomorrow.’ ‘King, it will be today.’ ‘Who told you that, boy?’ ‘Aunt Chana told me that. Do you know Aunt Chana?’ ‘I know Aunt Chana. Go on.’ ‘What should I tell Aunt Chana about the raid?’ ‘Tell her Benja knows about it for the roundup.’”

In Babel's short story “The King,” set in the 1920s, gang leader Benja Krik, nicknamed the King, learns that the police have literally declared a hunting season on his gang. The first meaning of the Russian word облавы (Oblava, phonetically) is “roundup,” a hunting method in which game, or birds, are frightened and driven out toward waiting hunters.

Later, in Mykolaiv, I came to understand what “raid” meant here. Police and mobilization officers blocked main roads, often before the working day began, between eight and ten in the morning. Sometimes, they did this even in the middle of the day. Traffic ground to a halt for hours as the police surrounded buses, streetcars, and cars, checking every man inside. Those who couldn’t produce proper mobilization documents were forcibly dragged from cabs, minibuses, or private cars.

“In some parts of the city, you won't see any men at all during the day, I promise you,” another driver, who was exempt from mobilization, told me later. “You only hear them at night, but you don't see them. The invisible ones! Ghosts! And I'm one of them too,” he added with a laugh. I tried to mirror his laughter, to ease the heaviness in his tone.

Stories like this came up again and again. Every day, I saw videos recorded by random witnesses—fragments of violence documented in towns and villages all across Ukraine.

“We’ll have our electricity cut off,” the driver said, shifting topics. “You’ll see how dark it gets here. At first, everyone complained. But now, it’s different. At least some people can go outside and breathe, take their child for a walk. Others sit at home all day. They won’t even go out for bread. It’s like they’re under house arrest. My brother’s like that—just sitting at home. We need him alive. We really need him.”

The driver’s words came defensively, as though he had to justify himself. Earlier, he had tried to tell me, with a certain bitterness, that “journalists will never understand people. It’s become unbearable to listen to them!” He was sure that I was a journalist.