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How to Prepare for War as Part of Everyday Urban Life

Russia’s occupied Donbas has already worked out the habits of survival now beginning to spread into Russia itself as war disrupts fuel, water, transport, and ordinary civic life.

Бензин по квотам, вода по часам, продукты про запас. Донбасс уже давно живет так, как Россия пока только привыкает. Рассказывает Дмитрий Дурнев

Novaya Gazeta Europe · By Dmitry Durnev · 18 June 2026 · read the original in Russian →

После ударов Украины по нефтеперерабатывающим заводам в России начались перебои с бензином: в десятках регионов появились квоты на топливо, на заправках выстраиваются очереди. С другой инфраструктурой жизнеобеспечения системных проблем пока не возникает — но во время войны трудно знать наверняка. Между тем оккупированный Россией Донбасс уже не первый год живет в условиях, когда неизвестно, можно ли будет завтра заправить машину, помыться или согреться в собственном доме. Раньше Россия перенимала у Донецка и Луганска практики массовых репрессий, теперь пришло время учиться у местных сценариям выживания. Спецкор «Новой газеты Европа» Дмитрий Дурнев поговорил с жителем Макеевки и рассказывает, как готовиться и чего ждать в условиях, когда война становится частью повседневной городской жизни.

After Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries in Russia, petrol shortages began: fuel quotas have appeared in dozens of regions, and queues are forming at filling stations. Other life-support infrastructure has not yet developed systemic problems, but in wartime it is hard to know anything for certain. Meanwhile, the Donbas occupied by Russia has for years been living in conditions in which no one knows whether tomorrow it will be possible to fill the car, wash, or keep warm at home. Russia once borrowed practices of mass repression from Donetsk and Luhansk; now the time has come to learn local survival scenarios. Novaya Gazeta Europe special correspondent Dmitry Durnev spoke with a resident of Makiivka and explains how to prepare and what to expect when war becomes part of everyday urban life.

В очереди на заправку бесполезно бесконечно включать и выключать двигатель — один час холостой работы, особенно если с кондиционером, сжигает примерно литр бензина. Считай свой бак сам, двигайся в очереди комфортно. На будущее: точно так же имеет смысл действовать в очереди на блокпосту.

In a queue for petrol, there is no point endlessly switching the engine on and off: one hour idling, especially with the air conditioner on, burns roughly a litre of petrol. Keep track of your own tank; move through the queue in comfort. For the future: it makes sense to act exactly the same way in a queue at a checkpoint.

The war hacks of the Donbas have survived long enough to be used in “mainland Russia,” that is, within its internationally recognized borders. The forecast for Moscow and the regions lies hidden in the past and present of Donetsk and Makiivka, where every survival practice has already been thought through, tested, and winnowed for effectiveness. What remains is the simple, pragmatic logic of physically securing one’s own existence. The dissatisfied will leave; the rest will stubbornly fight for a comfortable life, their own and their children’s, within the limits of the possible, of course.

“Everything is very simple now: the time has come again to stock up on water, food, petrol, and you need to get about five gas cylinders for the stove,” my friend Sergei from Makiivka, in Donetsk Oblast, tells me.

In theory, Sergei is ready for any turn the war may take. His car, for instance, is fitted with a gas system, and propane in the territory of the “DPR” is still freely available. “The day before yesterday I filled up; yesterday I see my station with the gas ‘barrel’ has been attacked by a drone, it’s burning!” Sergei laughs, rejoicing in his unfailing luck. Like others who have lived to see the thirteenth year of the war, especially men who wriggled free of the local general mobilization in 2022, he considers himself fortunate.

With petrol, things in Donetsk and Makiivka are worse: people queue for it. There are takers both for the “good offer,” 92 to 98 rubles per litre of A-95, and for harsher options at 120 rubles a litre.

They pour 30 litres at a time, and only into the tank; Sergei laments the missed commercial opportunity. “[If they dispensed it differently], one could arrange to buy it in canisters and sell it at 150 rubles a litre,” he explains. “There are already people to sell to: the queues eat up at least three hours.”

He himself has thought everything through long ago: not only has the car been converted to a gas-petrol system, with local propane gas, but the stove at home is gas too, running on cylinders. Unlike piped gas, this can be obtained at a filling station and laid in for future use, provided there are spare cylinders. The stove will fry and boil even after pipelines and pumping stations are damaged, autonomously, regardless of the military situation around it.

And here everyone knows that in wartime literally any infrastructure can be destroyed. This has been proved by the fate of the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas canal, a cyclopean structure that the advancing Russian army smashed from every side, systematically, from the reservoir in Kharkiv Oblast to the dam, pumping stations, and concrete channel in Donetsk Oblast. Since then, Donetsk and the surrounding cities have had no stable water supply: in good times, the schedule is observed, with water supplied in the evenings twice a week for three hours; in bad times, it is not. Everyone adapts in their own way: people install large tanks in apartments; sometimes specialized contractors carry them out onto stair landings.

Pensioners make do with dozens of plastic five-litre bottles, wash according to the schedule, and flush their toilets generously once, in the evening, at the end of the day.

“Right now everything is stable!” Sergei says. “The water is running, we can hear [the sound of a trickle in the plastic barrel], and if we don’t hear it, we switch on special ‘sucking’ pumps in the garden: they almost always draw it up into our barrels from the lower pipes in the settlement. There’s always a reserve of 1,000 litres in the house! My barrels have floats, little balls like that; as the water rises, it shuts off the inflow automatically, like in a toilet, you understand?”

Stable, of course, is not how it is for everyone. The “sucking” pumps in the garden suck water first of all from neighbors who have not scraped together the money for such miracle equipment. Here everything is like on an airplane: first take care of yourself, then your children, and only after that sympathize with others. Sergei has a godfather in the village of Makiivka, which has the same name as the city but is a separate settlement: no water comes through his pipes, and his barrel chronically fails to fill.

Last year’s meeting between Putin and the “head of the DPR,” Denis Pushilin, who reported low water levels in homes, reservoirs, and even mine ponds, changed nothing in this respect, while locals view such news with a certain apprehension: if they have dragged Putin himself into it, something is clearly being prepared, perhaps another general evacuation or a local mobilization. The surviving Donetsk residents sense propaganda between the lines; they habitually read alarm signals in sudden, loud “federal” information campaigns around the attack on a bus in Bryansk Oblast or the tragedy in Starobilsk. It is preferable not to work in budget-funded institutions or at systemically important enterprises, where there are medical checkups and other programs that record one’s identity; preferable not to be on the local “state’s” radar: they will take you into the army, jail you, or get you on the hook.

“I have this ‘Max’ only on my child’s phone,” Sergei shares from experience. “In the schools, by order, they left Telegram; now all the groups with teachers are in Max, and all lessons are assigned to them only there. Of course I don’t have it, but I use the child’s phone: I call a couple of friends whose Telegram no longer stirs. Telegram works differently in the near-front zone: the closer to the front, the better, and vice versa.”

The situation is extremely changeable. Petrol shortages in Donetsk began a couple of weeks ago, after the first news of attacks on refineries “on the mainland.” Shortly before that, a friend of Sergei’s had returned to Makiivka from there, from Russia.

“He and his wife left for the Kuban three years ago. Prices were already rising there then, but wages were too, and now they’ve begun to fall. His wife was paid kopecks, 30,000, and even then they started saying she might be dismissed!” Sergei explains his acquaintance’s situation. “But here [in Makiivka] there’s no need to rent an apartment, trade is turning over, there are a few more people: soldiers, pensioners bringing money into the shops, something is moving!”

But that, too, can change quickly. According to Sergei, trucks have not been coming to the Makiivka food depot for the third day: a neighbor works there as a watchman, and the news spreads down the street.

“The tankers refuse to come, they’re being torched!” Sergei explains. “The trucks are wary too, costs are rising, drivers dig in their heels, they’re afraid. I haven’t gone to the shop these days, haven’t monitored prices, but they’ll start creeping up too, one way or another! Look at the news: trucks are burning on the Mariupol highway, burning on the bypass around Donetsk and Makiivka. And at night the drones hum over us; they shoot at them with machine guns and assault rifles. We already sleep through it.”

What is more, the drones have changed: before, they somehow hummed evenly, but now they are constantly changing revs sharply, roaring unevenly, sometimes like a souped-up motorcycle engine, very similar: overhead, mrym-mryyyymmmm!

Sergei’s house stands not far from a road. The prospects are deeply alarming: although the routes to the Russian border at Uspenka and Novoazovsk have not yet been cut, and the strikes most often hit lateral roads running along the front, with military logistics the primary target, columns of military trucks are constantly passing Makiivka along the lit highway from the border, so their turn will certainly come.

Only a couple of months ago, in these parts, proximity to the highway seemed an advantage. As the warm season approached, the problem here became “SOChs,” deserters who had left their units without authorization and who keep knocking on doors, asking for food or a place to spend the night. Near the lit road, with military transport flashing past, they were afraid to act lawlessly; they went deeper into the private sector, into the darkness.

Now everything is the other way around: my acquaintance looks with anguish at the rare passing petrol tankers and the frequent tarpaulin-covered trucks. Could there be shells in the back? The house by the highway has quickly turned from a blessing into a life-threatening asset.

“But I still keep teaching my family: every door, every gate, literally everything must be tightly closed after seven in the evening!” Sergei continues. “If they come in, anything could happen: if the boys need a vehicle, they’ll take the keys and leave in the car!”

He speaks calmly: of course he will hand over the keys at the first demand. Lives are what matter; everything else can and must be given up at once when an armed person asks for it. In these places, the police have long stopped responding to calls after dark: it is frightening, and there are not enough people anyway.

For all the accumulating troubles, Sergei and his family are not planning to leave yet. Home is home: they held on to it even in more terrible times, in 2014 and 2015, when disorganized gang-battalions roamed around, each with its own commander, basement, and pair of controlled checkpoints. Now the situation is still more stable: if anything happens, they take you to a pre-trial detention center, not “to the basement.”

There is electricity, there is income, gas is being sold, the petrol queue can be endured, water can be waited for, and in the private sector one can also wash in a summer shower. For now all the businesses are operating; only the children’s planned trip to the Sea of Azov will have to be canceled: the roads are merciless to buses and any large transport, and it is better not to risk it.