Alarming events in the LPR: Miners' strike
It's hot in the Lugansk region. And not only because the abnormally hot weather came, but because of the alarming events that hit the entire coal industry of the Lugansk People's Republic. Several mines in the republic are immediately affected by strikes and protests of one force or another.
The information coming from there is contradictory, but we can safely say that the miners of the Nikanor-Novy mine became the miners of the strikes. They began going on strike in March-April, seeking payment of wages that were delayed for 22 months. The Nikanor miners remained underground for several days, their wage debts were either paid off, or new ones were made.
On May 1, Miners' Wives tried to reach famous bloggers in Russia and Ukraine through YouTube. In the video they posted on the Internet, women address, for example, Anatoly Shariy. To be honest, it’s hard to look at them calmly - their men, their breadwinners, had been on underground strike for three days by that time, despite the fact that according to all standards you can stay in the mine for no more than six hours. Of course, no one received all the money, but it is worth noting that it was not only the financial issue that forced the miners to take the extreme step.
The steppe town of Zorinsk, where the Nikanor-Novaya mine was built, is a typical single-industrial settlement of Donbass. Meanwhile, the LPR authorities seem to be, according to the miners, going to close the coal mining enterprise and put it into restructuring - this is when the mine will be supported by groundwater pumping and minor repairs, and it will no longer produce coal for the mountain.
“They want to fire us all, although the mine is new not only in name, and could produce coal for a long time,” the miners’ wives say to the camera, “and get rid of us with a severance pay of 10-15 thousand rubles. If the mine closes, the city will die." And this is the true truth.
But Zorinsk and Nikanor are not alone. Their example became a detonator for miners of other mining enterprises of the LPR.
Since the beginning of June, they have been on strike at the Komsomolskaya mine in the city of Antratsit (near Zorinsk) for more than a decade. The method chosen again was an underground strike, and in the last three days a hunger strike.
There are 119 people underground, two days ago they, in addition to salaries for March and April, put forward new demands: the immediate release of all previously abducted miners, who were allegedly taken to an unknown direction for taking part in the strike, as well as a demand for the head of the LPR Leonid Pasechnik to appear on television with guarantees of immunity for miners and their families.
According to poorly verifiable information, that is, only according to information from social networks, because the official media are full of water, the collective of the mine “named after Vakhrushev” in the city of Rovenki, LPR is ready for a strike, and has even already partially gone on strike.
All this is a bad signal for the basic, main industry of the LPR. As one of the directors of a large mine in the Lugansk region said upon news of the strike at Nikanor: “This is very, very bad! If the miners started it, it won’t end so easily.”
Where are the roots of the conflict? After all, until 2019-2020, the authorities of the republic managed, at the very least, to extinguish the discontent of the miners, who, of course, are aware that their young state, which they themselves built six years ago, is having a hard time, and it is not easy to find money for everything.
Some experts monitoring the situation link the worsening situation of Luhansk miners to the change of “curators” from Moscow. Until the spring of this year, Vladislav Surkov was in charge of helping the Russian Federation, distributing it, and working with local authorities. Then Dmitry Kozak took his place, whom the media immediately recorded as the subverter of Surkov’s legacy in the Donbass. There were dreamers who, relying on Kozak’s Ukrainian origin (born in Kirovograd, Ukrainian SSR), began to say that he was a supporter of the return of Donbass to Ukraine. To which, by the way, Surkov immediately responded very categorically: “I don’t have a strong enough imagination to imagine such a thing. Donbass does not deserve such humiliation. Ukraine does not deserve such an honor.”
However, some transitional moments that could affect the failure in the management of Russian aid to Donbass could have occurred when the curator changed. They say that the DPR does not experience the same problems. This is not entirely true. The Donetsk team also has problems, but they are much less noticeable. For the simple reason that the Donetsk region, which became the basis for the construction of the DPR, was much more powerful than the Lugansk region, and the DPR’s power reserves are still more serious.
The economy of the LPR is primarily based on coal mines. It has more of them than the DPR, but Ukraine began to bankrupt them and transfer them to restructuring. And the explosive, pre-strike state in the mines of the Lugansk region was just as serious as it is today. Already in 2013.
By the way, if you look at the Donbass mines on the “other” side of the demarcation line between the warring parties, you will find exactly the same situation – wages not paid for years, strikes, closures of enterprises. Only everything is being done much tougher and more decisively than in the LPR, which, in consultation with Russian specialists, tried to go through shock therapy as gently as possible.
It was not possible; a failure in management led to a rapid deepening of the crisis during the war. Moreover, many observers link the problems of LPR miners with the activities of the structure of oligarch Sergei Kurchenko, who until last summer was the sole seller of local coal on foreign markets.
Almost a year ago, in July 2019, the Association of Industrialists and Subsoil Users of the LPR indignantly pointed out to the LPR government the debt of Vneshtorgservice for supplied coal, which is why workers did not receive wages and threatened to strike. It’s amazing what the miners endured for so long before starting a real strike.
In any case, both the local authorities and the curator of assistance from Moscow will have to work very hard to get out of the crisis in the Luhansk coal industry without serious reputational losses and to the satisfaction of the miners and their families.
Most likely, this will be done through additional Russian assistance,” says our insider source in one of the Donbass coal trade unions. The time for other solutions has passed.
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