Sian Norris reports on Ukrainian miners resistance to Russian aggression
The smashed wall, peppered with shrapnel damage, marks the spot where in February, 12 miners were killed in a drone strike outside a mine in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The miners were heading home after their shift. Flowers lie on the ground, along with a photo of a young woman who rushed out of the neighbouring petrol station where she worked to help after the first drone hit. She was killed when the Russians struck again.
The shattered wall, the scattered roses, the candle in front of the woman’s photo: all provide a stark reminder of the danger miners face every day, as Russia seeks to seize control over the Donbas region and its coveted mines, coal and mineral wealth. It also shows how the killzone has expanded, with drone warfare redrawing the map of this conflict. To prevent a repeat of this massacre, miners and volunteers have now constructed a vast drone tunnel, stretching for 100km, on the roads between the conflict area and the region’s frontline towns.
Russia has spent 12 years trying to invade and capture the Donbas, and currently occupies 80% of the area. It’s now insisting that Ukraine hands over the 20% that remains under Kyiv’s control: what it has failed to take through violence, it hopes to take via Trump’s “negotiated peace”.
Mining is central to the Donbas’ identity. This is coal country, although increasingly you see solar farms operating across Ukraine. For over a century, generations of workers in the region have dug for coal, processed steel, and mined for essential minerals. Yurii and his colleague Andrii both worked in the mines; now they are local counsellors representing, as Andrii said, “the rights of miners, who are the biggest part of our citizens.”
The war has forced some, if not all, of the region’s mines to close, although there are no confirmed numbers of how many Ukrainian mines have been shelled. Historically, Ukraine had access to the world’s sixth largest coal reserves. But since the Russian invasion of the region in 2014, the country has lost about 80% of its coal deposits.
Just take the heavily fought-over city of Pokrovsk, where mines have halted production as the battle to control the city enters another year. The city was home to the largest supplier of coking coal, an essential raw material for the steel-making process, in post-2014 Ukraine. Producing 6m tonnes a year, it employed, with a sister mine, 10,000 people. Now the city is almost empty, and the mine is full not of workers and coal, but floodwaters.
Once a mine goes offline, it is gone forever: flooded and filled with deadly gases. It’s the end not just of production, but of a local history, a community, an identity, and a workforce. As for the occupied territories, 36 mines in the Russian-controlled parts of Donestsk have closed because of partial or complete flooding. There are reports that the remaining operational mines in the occupied regions are running with forced Ukrainian labour.
Sometimes, there’s no way to walk and climb to safety, and then it’s the job of men like Anatoly, who heads up a paramilitary unit dedicated to rescuing miners, to get them out. Training for rescue workers takes place in a fake mine located in the Dnipro region: a long, dark tunnel smelling of coal fires and earth, where, “we fill the mine with fog, and the men are trained to locate people and rescue them,” said Anatoly.
One of the major risks is the accumulation of methane, a highly explosive gas. “Too much smoke, fire, it’s impossible to breathe,” said Viktor. “There is no oxygen.” It’s hard, dangerous work, and “we are the only institution in Ukraine that saves and rescues miners.”
That includes in November last year, when 2,595 miners trapped underground in the Dnipro region were brought to safety by Anatoly, Viktor and the rest of the team, using a truck donated by the British trade unions through the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.
If attacks on mines are dangerous for workers and rescue teams, they have also caused widespread suffering throughout the country, with civilians battling to survive the worst winter since the start of the full-scale invasion. As temperatures dropped to minus-25 and snow piled up on the streets, Putin’s forces repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leaving millions of, often vulnerable, citizens without power.
Hundreds of miners have left their jobs to go and fight, with dozens more losing their lives on the frontlines. Others have returned from the front and gone back to work in the mining industry. Those who do, Serhii said, need support. “They have different injuries, physical and mental,” he said. “To help them adapt to normal life, we now have psychologists working at the mines.”
Some returning soldiers are too traumatised to go back to their old jobs, said Serhii, as “they can’t stand being underground, especially when the machinery is working.” People with life-changing injuries, as well as those struggling with trauma, have the opportunity to “re-train and learn new skills so they can change the kind of work they do, they can feel alive, and feel part of society.”
Meeting the evolving needs of workers, including displaced families and returning soldiers, has forced bosses, unions and the council to work collaboratively. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed so many people’s lives.