This project examines Ukraine’s wartime transformation through hydropower, understood as a water-energy nexus linking watersheds, rivers, electricity generation, irrigation, urban supply, industry, and everyday survival. It asks how damaged dams, reservoirs, pipelines, and power plants are kept operational under conditions of war, scarcity, and environmental destruction, and how these practices reshape society from below. Rather than treating hydropower as a purely technical sector, the project follows repair workers, engineers, utility managers, local authorities, environmental actors, state institutions, and international donors as part of a human and material assemblage in which everyday decisions and interactions sustain infrastructure and define what energy and water security mean in practice.

The project situates Ukraine’s hydropower systems both locally and within wider transnational infrastructures. Rivers and hydropower cascades do not stop at state borders: they connect Ukraine to Moldova, the European Union, and the Black Sea region through shared water basins, environmental risks, energy markets, reconstruction finance, and competing security agendas. The three case studies—Donbas, the lower Dnipro, and the Dnister/Nistru—therefore function not as isolated sites, but as interconnected windows onto a broader process: the wartime reconfiguration of Ukraine’s water-energy systems and their integration into Ukrainian, European, and Black Sea political, ecological, and infrastructural space.