In the chaos of war, dangers multiply for Ukraine’s miners
TORETSK, Ukraine — When a 155-millimeter rocket plows into the ground and you’re 2,000 feet under it, you hear nothing — you barely even feel it. Which was why Andriy Podhornay was surprised when his manager came on the walkie-talkie and told the crew in the bowels of the St. Matrona Moskovskaya mine that a Russian artillery strike had just hit. They started moving — fast.
“We were eating when he called us. We immediately went up,” said Podhornay, a wiry 32-year-old with a weathered face.
“No one wants to risk getting trapped down there.”
When he got to the surface, he found the elevator tower wreathed in black smoke and a large crater right behind it. He quickly joined the others to inspect for damage, taking a moment to pick up shell fragments.
The attack last week was the first to strike the mine’s compound, but hardly the first to have battered this landscape. Toretsk, a city with a prewar population of some 32,000, is only a few miles from the so-called contact line, the 2015 demarcation that divided government-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine from those seized by Moscow-backed separatists a year earlier. The town has been a frequent target.
But that conflict — killing more than 14,000 people before a shaky cease-fire took hold — was against relatively illequipped irregulars on a stalemated front line. It’s a different situation today with Ukrainian troops facing a Russian army engaged in a slow-roll grind that seizes territory by the day. Toretsk, like so many other mining cities across the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, may soon be excised from Kyiv’s grip.
That’s a devastating blow to Ukraine’s economy, said Alina Zuikovska, former head of sustainable development at the DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company and a major investor in the nation’s coal mines. But it also inflicts “serious psychological trauma” on the very idea of what it means to be Ukrainian.
“Donbas is the personification of the industrial heart of the country,” Zuikovska said. “The loss of this region is the loss of economic identity for Ukrainians.”
For the miners, it delivers the coup de grace to an endangered way of life, one that for many here seems almost a birthright, or generational curse, depending on how you look at it.
The Donbas is a powerhouse of coal production, its terrain virtually defined by skeletal elevator towers and slag heaps known as “terrikons.” The name Donbas is a portmanteau of the Donets coal basin, and home to most of the coal riches — 44 billion tons as of 2020, Zuikovska said — that once made Ukraine the third-largest producer in Europe and holder of the world’s sixth-largest reserve. The coal dug from here fueled the Russian empire, then the Soviet Union, whose propagandists depicted the region in one poster as a heart pumping blood to factories all over the U.S.S.R. After Ukraine won its independence in 1991, the region’s coal-fired thermal plants provided almost a third of the country’s energy needs and powered its metallurgical sector.
But much of that has since been undercut, whether by government neglect and corruption or by conflict, first in 2014 when roughly two-thirds of coal mines fell under separatist control, and now the Russian invasion. In 1990,
Ukraine produced 164 million tons of coal; that figure was halved by 2013 — then more than halved again in the years after the war against the separatists. Even before Russia’s campaign, many mines — especially those owned by the states — were unprofitable and had to be shuttered.
“The coal industry was in crisis much earlier than the war, because we have no systematic vision on how to develop it,” said Sergey Kuzyara, a prominent coal mining businessman who escaped from Donetsk city in 2014 and now lives in the capital, Kyiv.
Lack of investment had ensured the mines were working well below capacity, he said. Worse, the Ukrainian government’s coal stockpiles coming into this year amounted to a third of what they should have been, meaning there isn’t enough fuel for the winter months — even as the price of coal is increasing worldwide.