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The mine, near the frontline city of Pokrovsk, produced coking coal crucial for Ukraine’s steel industry. It kept running until the very last moment, when Russian forces finally reached its gates.
By Constant Méheut and Daria Mitiuk
Photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly
The reporters visited the mine this summer and spoke by phone to eight miners now in other parts of Ukraine as Russian forces closed in.
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.
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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.