Russia’s Accounts Chamber has delivered a damning assessment of the federal ‘Clean Water’ project. Of the 138 billion roubles allocated from the federal budget, 28% was spent without producing any tangible results.According to the auditors, the project was declared formally completed largely through what amounted to outright window-dressing. Facilities that had been started but never finished were excluded from the final reports, while projects that had nothing to do with federal funding were counted toward the targets. Meanwhile, the share of water samples in Russia’s water supply systems deemed unfit for consumption is not falling — it is rising.
The federal ‘Clean Water’ project was designed to improve drinking water quality by modernising water supply systems and introducing advanced treatment technologies, including solutions developed by companies in the defence-industrial sector.
The programme ran from 2019 to 2024. Yet data from the state statistics agency Rosstat suggest that both the quality of drinking water and its availability to the population have been worsening rather than improving.
The share of tap water samples in Russia failing to meet sanitary standards has not declined — it has grown. In 2015, 16.1% of samples nationwide were deemed unsafe; by 2024 that figure had risen to 17.3%. The situation is even worse in rural areas. There, the share of substandard samples increased from 19.4% in 2015 to 21.5% in 2024, according to data from the state statistics agency Rosstat. At the same time, the country’s water supply infrastructure has been shrinking rather than expanding. The total number of water supply systems in Russia fell from 66,000 in 2015 to 60,000 in 2024. In rural settlements the decline was similar, with the number dropping from 56,000 to 51,000.
‘Providing Russians with safe, high-quality drinking water is the main goal of the federal “Clean Water” project,’ Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said in the summer of 2024. ‘Over the five and a half years since its launch, 1,214 facilities have been built or modernised across 81 regions. Work at 31 of them was completed in the first half of 2024 alone.’
According to Khusnullin, between January and June 2024 four new facilities were commissioned in the Penza region; three each in the Vladimir region and Kamchatka; two each in Kabardino-Balkaria and Buryatia, as well as in the Krasnoyarsk region and the Kaluga and Omsk regions. Single facilities were also launched in Udmurtia and Tatarstan, Primorsky region, and in the Volgograd, Voronezh, Kaliningrad, Kostroma, Kursk, Novosibirsk, Saratov and Tyumen regions.
‘As a result of the measures implemented under the “Clean Water” project in the first half of the year, residents of 30 settlements across 19 regions gained access to safe drinking water through centralised supply systems,’ Deputy Minister of Construction and Housing and Utilities Alexey Eresko reported. ‘For comparison, 30 drinking water supply and treatment facilities were commissioned during the same period last year, while in the first six months of 2022 the figure stood at 21.’
However, an audit by the Accounts Chamber found that such upbeat reports from government officials tell only part of the story. The key benchmark for the ‘Clean Water’ programme was meant to be an increase in the share of the population receiving safe drinking water from centralised systems — from 85.5% in 2018 to 88.8% by 2024. In reality, many regions failed to deliver the planned improvement in access to clean water. In some parts of the country, the situation has even worsened.
In Ingushetia, for example, the share of residents with access to drinking water fell by 7.1 percentage points. In the Nizhny Novgorod region the figure dropped by 2.2 percentage points, and in Kamchatka by 0.2 percentage points. Overall, the Accounts Chamber recorded a deterioration in access to drinking water in 14 regions across the country.
Yet in official reporting the ‘Clean Water’ programme has been declared a success. According to the final report, the share of Russia’s population supplied with safe drinking water through centralised systems increased by 3.7 percentage points to reach 89.2%.
The Accounts Chamber has offered its explanation for the gap between the official results and the reality on the ground. According to auditor Natalia Trunova, the targets set under the ‘Clean Water’ project were formally met at the national level largely due to adjustments to the planned indicators, significant regional disparities and the inclusion in the final tally of facilities built without federal subsidies.
Of the nearly 140 billion roubles allocated from the federal budget for the programme, more than 38 billion roubles (27.8%) were spent without delivering the intended results. By the time the project formally ended on December 31, 2024, 119 water supply facilities in 56 regions remained unfinished. As of December 22, 2025, construction had still not been completed at 85 of those sites across 46 regions.
In its recommendations, the Accounts Chamber proposes that the Ministry of Construction be tasked with drawing up a ‘road map’ to bring unfinished water supply facilities into operation. It also suggests tying the level of federal subsidies to how well regions are supplied with drinking water.
