Ukraine: the exiles of the Russian occupation to the rescue of the coal mines

June 11, 2023

While Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is the target of repeated attacks from Moscow, the few coal mines still in Ukrainian hands are operating at full capacity as much as possible, thanks to new recruits who have fled the east of the country occupied by the Russians.

“Many, many of those who were forced to leave the occupied zone wanted to work for us,” said Oleg Bilousov, chief engineer of a group of mines in the central Dnipropetrovsk region. According to him, a third of the 2,780 miners in his company come from Donbass, an industrial region in eastern Ukraine partly occupied by the Russians.

At a coal mining site in Ukraine, the precise location of which the owner company asked AFP to conceal, a rusty steel elevator attached to a massive winch plunges miners 180 meters underground.

The workers then climb into closed metal wagons which an electric locomotive descends, through more than a kilometer of galleries, 370 meters deep where the coal is extracted.

– “impossible to survive” –

There miners like Artyom, 37, who studied in now Russian-occupied Donetsk, talk about the mix of political and economic pressure that drove many of them west.

For him, Vladimir Putin’s desire to set himself up as the protector of Donbass is a joke. The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was justified by Moscow in particular by a desire to defend the self-proclaimed “republics” by the pro-Russian separatists in Lugansk and Donetsk in the Donbass.

“It’s all a lie,” Artyom said, his face marred by sweat and coal dust as he worked for the morning maintenance crew.

Some of his friends fled to Russia, others on the contrary, like him, chose the unoccupied part of Ukraine. But no one works any longer in the mines in the east of the country.

“It’s impossible to survive there. There’s literally no work there. The living conditions are really bad. They don’t get paid at all, or they get very little,” says- he told AFP.

Despite the influx of labor from the east, the mine still lacks hands. “Many are fighting,” Artyom continues.

However, the mine is benefiting from the arrival of a female workforce in positions that would previously have been occupied only by men. With her two children, her mother and her husband, Vika, 36, fled Lysychansk to the Russian-occupied part of the Lugansk region.

“Can you imagine our suffering, for us people who come from there, after the closure of the mines. Where can we work? After losing our homes, we lost our jobs”, confides this ex-employee of a grocery store that is now an elevator operator and transport manager.

Employees like Vika enjoy the steady pay, health insurance that comes with this job.

“Here I feel good, even if I don’t speak Ukrainian fluently. It’s not a problem at all”, assures the young woman in work overalls, helmet on her head. “Of course I would love to go home. But I don’t have a home anymore. It’s destroyed. I hope Ukraine will allow me to return home and maybe help me rebuild my House”.

Since the beginning of the war, many civilians have left the Russian-occupied areas in eastern Ukraine, taking refuge in towns still controlled by kyiv. Mines in occupied areas or close to the front line have closed. Some were flooded during power cuts that prevented their water pumps from working.

In central Ukraine, when the war escalated, “many miners from that region enlisted voluntarily,” says Bilousov. The miners who stayed on had to work twice as much.

“It was a difficult time for the company and for the country,” says Bilousov. On four occasions last year workers at the bottom of the mine during power cuts had to be evacuated, he says.

Of the 89 coal mines that Ukraine had at the time of its independence and the fall of the Soviet Union, 71 are in the Donbass.

Mines controlled by kyiv supply 30% of the Ukrainian network. They are managed by DTEK, the largest private player in the energy sector in Ukraine.

According to kyiv, since Russia invaded Ukraine, 50% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has come under attack. From October Moscow attacked these sites, repeatedly plunging the population into cold and darkness.