This Year, Some Russian Regions Flooding, Others Face Drought, and Still a Third Group has Water but It is Unsafe to Drink

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 5 – The Russian Federation is such an enormous country that it should not surprise anyone that when it suffers problems with water availability, these vary enormously with some regions experiencing extreme floods, others growing drought and still a third, overlapping but going beyond each of these, a shortage of water that is safe to drink.

            This year alone, Horizontal Russia documents, all three crises have hit Russia, something that might have been at least partially averted if either the federal subjects had more authority and resources to address them or Moscow was more interested in the welfare of the country than in going to war (semnasem.org/articles/2026/08/05/vodnyj-krizis).

            The most severe flooding this year came in the North Caucasus where thousands of people were flooded out of their homes, roads were blocked, and electricity and drinking water supplies cut off for weeks at a time. But other regions suffering severe flooding included Irkutsk, Chelyabinsky and Sverdlovsk oblasts.

            Those areas suffering water shortages were of two kinds, places in south Russia where global warming is spreading drought, and others across the country where aging infrastructure and the failure of the authorities to do anything about it meant people did not have clean and safe water to drink.

            Bodaibo in Irkutsk Oblast became a symbol of the latter when pipes froze and residents had neither heat nor water for more than a month.  Less widely covered disasters of this kind also hit a village in Karelia, one in Primorsky Kray, and thousands of residents in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East.

            But it is the third category, places where water is flowing but is no longer safe, that is perhaps the most disturbing because it includes places where the authorities could have prevented the problem but failed to do so because they lacked either the funds or the will to do so.

            Problems of this kind hit Russian cities and villages across the country, outraging residents but seldom getting the kind of coverage that other far less damaging developments do because they have not yet had the kind of political consequences or fit into the usual media matrix of what constitutes a problem as opposed to what is viewed as an act of God.