Water crisis may occur in Crimea

Fresh water reserves continue to decline in the temporarily occupied Crimea - in May 2025 alone, local reservoirs lost about 11 million cubic meters of water.

According to Inzhyr Media, this information was disseminated by Ilya Nikolenko, Head of the Department of Chemical Technologies of Water Use at the occupation university - Vernadsky Kyiv Federal University. He stated that the current volume of water in the reservoirs is 126 million cubic meters. This is about 50% of their maximum capacity. Last year, this figure was about 75%.

"Such rates of depletion of water reserves indicate the beginning of a low-water period," the media quoted the occupying university head as saying.

In addition, Nikolenko is convinced that Crimea is facing "the threat of a recurrence of the acute water crisis that it already experienced in 2020-2021."

This situation, in the absence of long-term solutions, could lead to a new wave of environmental and humanitarian instability on the occupied peninsula, the journalists write.

Last year, the reserves of the Crimean reservoirs decreased by 6.5% per month. Thus, the total water reserves in the Crimean reservoirs on the rivers as of the beginning of May amounted to just over 190 million cubic meters, which is about 6.5% lower than the level as of the beginning of April.

After the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station dam was blown up by the Rashids, water stopped flowing into the North Crimean Canal. The Kakhovka Reservoir in Kherson Oblast had been supplying Crimea with Dnipro water for more than half a century. Water was taken from it into the North Crimean Canal using engineering structures built there shortly after the Kakhovka HPP.

It was also said that heavy winter precipitation made it possible to fill not only the Belogorskoye but also the adjacent Taiganskoye reservoir in Crimea. Now the situation has changed rapidly. The Belogorskoye reservoir is rapidly losing water again.

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