Money for Mykolaiv water treatment plant allocated from the state budget, and EIB loan can be spent on «additional equipment»

New water treatment facilities for the centralised water supply in Mykolaiv are being built at the expense of funds saved during the construction of a new water supply system.

This is described in the article NikVesti «When will Mykolaiv get drinking water in the taps and how much will it cost?».

As you know, the construction of new water treatment facilities for Mykolaiv was planned to be financed by loans from the European Investment Bank, with the rest to be provided by the Danish government as grant support. This project would have taken several years to implement and was supposed to help provide the city with water of European standards.

This idea has now been abandoned, the head of the State Agency for Reconstruction explained. It was decided to build a new water treatment plant at public expense — the money saved during the construction of a new water supply system for the city.

«Mykolaiv has been part of the EIB project for about 7 or 8 years now to build a sewage treatment plant for the city. We have met with the Danes and the European Investment Bank many times. This is a really cool project, but today the city of Mykolaiv simply cannot physically guarantee this loan due to the limited budget.

And then it was decided, including through savings from this project, to build a water treatment plant for the city of Mykolaiv. The water quality will improve significantly starting in January,» said Sukhomlyn.

However, the water treatment plant will be fully operational in March 2026, added Dmytro Troiekurov, CEO of the contractor «Avtostrada».

Sukhomlyn says that the city can still take out an EIB loan if it wishes and spend the money, for example, on additional equipment.

«The issue is that Mykolaiv, together with the European Investment Bank, also wants to make a water treatment plant project. And this could be additional equipment, an additional construction unit. There are no problems here.

But today, the sewage treatment plants that are currently being built for Mykolaiv, once commissioned at the end of the first quarter, will be enough to provide the city with quality water. This equipment is already designed for water from Inhulets, it can treat salt water and everything else,» explained Serhii Sukhomlyn.

The new water supply system for Mykolaiv was launched in October 2025.

Water supply for Mykolaiv. A little history

It has been more than three years since Russian troops damaged the water supply system that supplied Mykolaiv with water. Since then, the city of almost half a million people been a centralised supply of quality water.

All this time, Mykolaiv residents have been receiving water from a backup source, which raises many questions about the such water and the salt content in its composition. The salt water damaged 1,200 kilometres of the city's water supply network. Borys Dudenko, director of «Mykolaivvodokanal», said that it is impossible to replace the entire length of the network that was damaged by the salt water supply.

For a long time, representatives of state and local authorities have been looking for ways to restore drinking water supply in Mykolaiv. The final solution was found in 2024: a new water supply line would be laid from Nova Odesa, and the money was allocated from the state budget.

The regional recovery service even selected contractors who will work according to the principle of «design-build». They are three companies, each of which is responsible for one of the three work areas: «Ukrtransmist», «Rostdorstroi» and «Avtostrada». However, later both the client and the construction contractor were changed. The customer for the new water pipeline was the Service for Infrastructure Restoration and Development in Dnipropetrovsk region, and the contractor was the group of companies «Avtostrada».