It was late at night and Anton Telegin was driving toward a sprawling coal mine near Ukraine’s eastern front line, using darkness to evade Russian attack drones.
Mr. Telegin had come to collect wages for himself and some fellow miners, as he did at the end of every month. But this trip, on the day after Christmas, felt different: Russian troops were at one of the far gates of the mine, and he wondered whether it would be his last trip to the place where he had worked for 18 years. The last few months, he and his colleagues had toiled under escalating Russian attacks.
Two days earlier, a strike knocked out the plant’s electricity substation, halting operations. Sensing the end, some miners left, taking their towels and shampoo from the changing rooms where they scraped soot from themselves at the end of long shifts.
“People were packing up, already saying goodbye,” Mr. Telegin, 40, recalled.
Mr. Telegin has not returned to the mine since Christmas and is now in Kyiv. The approaching fighting kept the facility out of action and on Tuesday, Metinvest, the company that owns the mine, announced that the facility was now shut.
The closing of the mine, located just southeast of the embattled city of Pokrovsk, ended a desperate effort by Ukraine to keep it running until the very last moment. As Ukraine’s last operational mine producing coking coal — an essential fuel for steel production — it was vital to the country’s steel industry and, ultimately, its war effort.
Miners who stayed despite the dangers were offered pay rises by Metinvest. To reach mining areas closest to the front, they had to walk through miles of tunnels protecting them from attacks. Shelling caused frequent blackouts, trapping them underground for hours.
“There is constant shelling, and it’s very close,” Maksym Rastyahaev, the head of a mining unit, said in a phone call after a shift at the mine shortly before Christmas. “Only the most resilient workers have remained.”
Now, the mine’s closure is expected to send shock waves through the economy. Steel production is projected to drop by more than half, from 7.5 million tons this year to less than 3 million next year, according to Oleksandr Kalenkov, head of Ukraine’s steel makers’ association. The fallout will affect trade — metal and steel products were Ukraine’s second-largest export last year — reduce tax revenues and strip the military of essential materials for armor production.
“The impact, in all its aspects, is tremendous,” Mr. Kalenkov said.
The mine near Pokrovsk is not the first to fall to Russia, whose forces have decimated much of eastern Ukraine’s industrial base. But its story is one of Ukrainian resilience: after scaling back operations following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, coal production rebounded to 3.2 million tons in 2023, nearing prewar levels. That year, many residents returned to Pokrovsk, hopeful the tide of the war was turning in Ukraine’s favor.
The mine was an economic lifeline for the area. In 2023, Metinvest employed some 4,500 people at the facility, many of whom had spent most of their working lives there. “I’m a miner. I don’t know how to do anything else. All I know is how to mine coal,” said Yurii Nesterenko, 35, who had worked there for a decade.
The pay was good, and Metinvest’s mining facilities reflected a sense of care. On a visit this summer, the mine boasted flower beds, fountains and an Orthodox chapel adorned with gold icons and intricate ceilings, offering a quiet retreat for miners to pray.
By late summer 2024, however, the first signs of danger had appeared. Renewed Russian advances in the east had spurred a mobilization drive that drained the mine’s work force, prompting it to hire women to replace conscripted men. Even more concerning, the mine lay in the path of Russia’s push to flank Pokrovsk, a key military logistics hub.
“Everyone hoped Ukrainian soldiers would hold the line,” said Vyacheslav Dryha, an engineer who left the mine in the fall and is now in Kharkiv. Some employees began monitoring battlefield maps daily, tracking the Russian advance.
In late September, strikes on the mine killed four female workers in as many days. Two were at a laundry station, while the two others were waiting at a bus stop. The deaths sent a chill through the staff, prompting many to leave and join the flow of residents evacuating Pokrovsk. Russian forces were less than 10 miles away.
From then on, miners described strikes getting more and more frequent. Some opted to drive their own cars to the mine instead of taking the bus, to better evade drones that had appeared overhead. The mine’s shaft No. 3, located closest to the front, in the village of Pishchane, began coming under regular shelling.
In early December, when shaft No. 3 became too dangerous to use, miners switched to descending into the mine through another shaft farther west. From there, they faced a two-hour, six-mile trek through underground tunnels to reach the coal faces beneath shaft No. 3. To come back, they rode the conveyor belts transporting freshly extracted coal.
It was a perilous job. Power and ventilation systems sometimes broke down because of the shelling, forcing miners to evacuate. Yet, with the fighting raging above, they still felt safer underground, in the mine’s dim, nearly 2,000-foot-deep tunnels.
“The earth itself kind of protects you,” said Volodymyr Kohanevych, who maintained equipment at the mine.
Keeping the mine running as long as possible was critical for Metinvest, which relied on coking coal to smelt iron ore into steel at its factories further west. The steel is used to make rails for Ukraine’s railways, a transport lifeline during the war, as well as body armor and helmets for soldiers. Earlier this month, Metinvest launched production of protective armored plates for the U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems that protect Ukrainian skies.
“We’re like a second front, working for the victory,” Mr. Telegin said of the miners and steel workers.
But by mid-December, Mr. Telegin and his colleagues knew this second front was collapsing. Russian troops had advanced to within a mile of shaft No. 3, raising fears they might capture it and exploit its tunnels to outflank Ukrainian positions. In response, the miners, working with the military, began drilling holes beneath the shaft to place explosives, according to several workers.
A few days later, around Dec. 20, the shaft was blown up. “Everything collapsed, and now it’s all rock,” Mr. Telegin said.
A Metinvest manager, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak, said explosives had also been placed in the facility’s two other shafts farther west, near the villages of Kotlyne and Udachne, which remain under Ukrainian control today. It is unclear if they have already been detonated.
From 7,000 tons of coal a day this summer, production fell to just over 2,000 tons by mid-December, the manager said. The strike on the electricity substation, on Christmas Eve, dealt the final blow: the mine shut down and production dropped to zero.
Mr. Kalenkov, the steel expert, said the mine’s closure put Ukraine in a precarious situation. Importing coking coal to make up for the loss will be costly and complicated by war-related logistical hurdles. He expects a strain on an already fragile economy, but also cutbacks in defense industry projects, such as the production of armor for Patriot systems.
“The loss of the mine definitely hinders Ukraine’s combat capabilities,” Mr. Kalenkov said.
Many of the roughly 1,000 miners who stayed until the end have now relocated to cities farther from the front such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro. Some have already secured new jobs in factories, while others remain uncertain about their prospects.
Mr. Rastyahaev, 40, who spent half his life working at the mine, said it had been “very painful” to leave a place he had helped build and develop. As he spoke last week, he had yet to hear from his management about the mine’s future.
“Honestly,” he said, “I think it’s the end.”
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