The miners are threatening to march on Kyiv - to “cut out the throat” of Yatsenyuk
Pavlograd, the capital of Western Donbass, under the control of the Ukrainian authorities, as local residents call it, is slightly shocked by the changes that the Yatsenyuk government presented in its either a reform plan or a coalition program - as you prefer to call it.
According to the plan, 32 mines are proposed to be closed altogether, 24 to be mothballed and 37 to be privatized. At the same time, it is proposed to buy coal abroad.
"For what?!" - Pavlograd miners, who make up the city-forming majority, are perplexed. If the mines close, famine will begin in a city of more than a hundred thousand people, because people will have nowhere to work.
So far, according to Pavlogradugol, there is no talk of closing local mines; they say, in general, this is one of the most reliable enterprises. However, troubling facts are hidden behind the soothing words.
Coal seams in Western Donbass are among the thinnest in the country - 0,6-1,2 m. Due to the fact that the miner “takes” a layer of rock no less than 1-1,1 m thick, i.e. It rakes up a lot of earth on thin seams; the ash content of coal here is one of the highest in Ukraine (usually 38-40%, sometimes more than 50%). Therefore, in addition to production, Pavlogradugol necessarily has to bear the costs of enrichment. Accordingly, the profit from the mines is small. There are persistent rumors among workers that they may be the first to suffer from government “reforms.”
Vitaly, who works as a GRAZ at one of the Pavlograd mines, is surprised by the plans of the Kyiv leadership, since the government is cutting the branch on which it sits. The coal in Donbass is still better than the South African coal that the deputies are planning to bring to the country.
Many miners consider the government's plans in Pavlograd to be an outright and deliberate destruction of the industry. Moreover, during all the years of independence not a penny was invested in the modernization of production. Therefore, mining is often unprofitable. This can be corrected with the right approach, but no one is implementing it, especially at mines preparing for privatization. It is cheaper for oligarchs to buy low-profit enterprises.
When a mine is privatized, the business condemns the entire accompanying infrastructure to destruction. This threatens the death of dozens of mining villages - kindergartens, hospitals and other facilities that are traditionally looked after by mine administrations are closed.
“If my mine is closed, I will go to Kyiv on foot and personally rip out the throat of the one who came up with this. And I think that I will not go there alone. They will support me. And any miner at any Ukrainian mine will do this. And if he asks for help, all the miners will support him,” says Vitaly.
Pavlograd miners already organized hiking trips to the capital in the 90s, and the sound of helmets knocking on the asphalt was probably not forgotten by the deputies of the old cadenzas. Soon, it seems, the young “reformers” from the Maidan will also have to hear it. Do they know that mass protests by miners at one time became a catalyst for the collapse of the USSR?
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