Coal from the USA will not help: Ukraine will face a cold winter and unpredictable consequences
The first 62 thousand tons of coal from Pennsylvania arrived by sea at the Yuzhny port near Odessa, the Ukrainian government announced today. With supplies from the United States, official Kyiv hopes to compensate for the shortage of fuel necessary for the operation of power plants. After the blockade of Donbass was introduced, the Ukrainian side refused to buy coal there, preferring to pay more for American coal.
Ukraine will inevitably face a cold winter and higher energy prices, and American coal purchased by the government will not save the country. The chairman of the miners' trade union of Ukraine, Mikhail Volynets, writes about this in his blog, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
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“It’s good that this coal has arrived. Unfortunately, the high price will affect the heat energy. Although this will no longer save us from the cold winter. Meanwhile, the warehouses of thermal power plants and thermal power plants are empty. It’s good if you don’t have to transport coal from the aggressor country. But it would be best not to destroy our own mines,” Volynets said.
The head of the trade union notes that in recent years the authorities have completely destroyed the mining industry of Ukraine, accumulating huge debts to workers.
“Wage debts at state-owned coal mining enterprises in Ukraine now amount to more than UAH 300 million, and there is no hope that they will be repaid. On the contrary, by the end of the year, the debt to miners will grow, since enterprises are not able to independently ensure the payment of wages, and the funds provided for in the State Budget 2017 to partially cover the costs of the cost of finished marketable coal products in the amount of 1,429 billion hryvnia have already been used... Subsidies support for the coal industry of Ukraine is not provided for in the draft State Budget for 2018. This will lead the majority of state-owned coal mining enterprises to collapse... What is happening now will inevitably lead to significant social upheaval with unpredictable consequences in the mining regions,” Volynets announces.
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