Kim: ₴3bn saved on water pipeline construction to be spent on treatment system in Mykolaiv

Head of the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration Vitaliy Kim, archive photo NikVesti

The head of the Mykolaiv regional military administration, Vitalii Kim, said that the 3 billion hryvnias saved on the construction of a new water supply system for Mykolaiv could be spent on modernising the water treatment system.

He said this in an interview with «Ukrinform».

«We are saving on construction, but we expect that part of these funds will go to other areas that have been left without funding. First of all, water purification, which is the responsibility of the city of Mykolaiv,» said Vitalii Kim.

A new water supply system for Mykolaiv is expected to be built by August 2025. However, this does not guarantee that the city will immediately receive drinking water, as a new water treatment system needs to be built, Kristina Mikulova, Head of the European Investment Bank's Regional Centre for Eastern Europe, told NikVesti earlier.

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According to her, the construction of a new water treatment plant may take two years, but «this does not mean that the city will not have drinking water for two years».

Currently, the Mykolaiv Recovery Agency is working to modernise the treatment plant and launch it simultaneously with the new water supply system, Serhii Koreniev, deputy mayor of Mykolaiv and head of the city's recovery working group, told NikVesti.

Read also the article NikVesti «Three years without drinking water: what will the future water supply be like for Mykolaiv?».

Water supply for Mykolaiv

Almost three years have passed since Russian troops damaged the water supply to Mykolaiv. Since then, the city of almost half a million people has been without a centralised supply of drinking water. Currently, Mykolaiv residents receive water from a backup source, which raises many questions about the quality of the water and the salt content.

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 salt water. As of August 2024, only about 3 kilometres of the network had been replaced.

Saltwater-damaged pipes stored at the company «Mykolaivvodokanal», August 2024, photo «NikVesti»

All this time, representatives of state and local authorities were looking for options to restore drinking water supply in Mykolaiv. The final solution was found in 2024: a new water supply system would be laid from Nova Odesa, and the money was allocated from the state budget.

The Regional Reconstruction Service has already 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 «Motorway».

The future water pipeline for Mykolaiv is expected to be built and launched by autumn 2025, said Serhii Sukhomlyn, head of the State Agency for Reconstruction.

However, the question of the new water supply system's design capacity remains unresolved: on the one hand, there is an opinion that water consumption in Mykolaiv has decreased, and therefore a new calculation needs to be made, and on the other hand, limiting the amount of water can directly affect the future development of the city and its industry.

Back during the conference in Berlin in 224, the First Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Oleksandr Korniienko, answering a question NikVesti, said that the lack of drinking water in Mykolaiv was one of the biggest problems in Ukraine that the state should solve in the near future.

And President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ordered the construction of a new water supply system to provide Mykolaiv with drinking water «under the fast track option» — drinking water should be available by the summer of 2025. The government has already approved the programme.

Construction of the new water supply system began in early 2025. The cost of the work was reduced from 8.7 billion hryvnias to 5 billion hryvnias. This became possible after a detailed analysis of the project, which revealed several planning errors.

Initially, a new water supply system for Mykolaiv was promised to be built by autumn 2025. But, as reported by the European Investment Bank, this does not guarantee that the city will immediately receive drinking water, as a new water treatment system needs to be built.

Later, the State Agency for Reconstruction reported that the centralised supply of drinking water in Mykolaiv was expected to be launched by August 2025. At the same time, Mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych spoke about «a temporary solution» that would help bring drinking water to the city simultaneously with the launch of the new water supply system.

What is the capacity of the water supply system?

Initially, the water supply system was planned to be built with a capacity of 160,000 cubic metres per day. However, later they started talking about the possibility of reducing this figure to 100,000 cubic metres, based on the city's current water consumption.

Currently, Mykolaiv residents consume between 75,000 and 108,000 cubic metres of centralised process water per day. But in the future, water consumption may be higher, as there are no large enterprises operating in the city today, and the population is still lower than before the war.

However, official calculations were to be provided to the State Agency for Reconstruction by the Mykolaiv Regional Water Authority. They calculated two construction projects to determine the capacity of the water supply system: 120 or 160 thousand cubic metres per day.

In February 2025, the head of the Mykolaiv Regional Water Authority, Vitalii Kim, said that reducing the cost of building a new water supply system would not affect water quality, but could affect the volume of water supplied to the city.