The Russian company, which is owned, in particular, by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s friend Gennady Tymchenko, doesn’t hide the fact that it employs miners from the Russian-occupied Donbas.
The holding’s website even has a whole section on employment opportunities “for citizens of Ukraine and the Donbas republics.” In 2016 alone, Kolmar hired 200 Ukrainian miners, according to Interfax.
[b]The relocation of 2,000 miners and their families to Yakutia took place as the Russian company decided to gradually get rid of the worker rotation system of extraction. The holding helped the miners obtain Russian citizenship and sent them to the city of Neryungri in the south of Yakutia, some 5,450 kilometers away from their homeland.[/box]“The shortage of staff is great: historically in Yakutia, there were no underground and enrichment workers, we have to invest a lot in education and training,” the holding stated back then.
The fact that Russian recruiters offer the ORDLO miners employment in mines in the Russian Federation in exchange for citizenship under a simplified procedure has already been reported by Ukraine’s Ombudsman’s Office.
“Complete crews of coal miners are leaving ORDLO for the Russian mines. They explain this by saying that at Russian mines, wages are paid more or less on time, while the occupiers in ORDLO have not yet paid their wage arrears, while it’s almost impossible to go to other countries during the pandemic,” the representative of the Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada for Human Rights in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, Pavlo Lysianskyi, explained.
At the same time, the Russian authorities shut down more than 40 mines in ORDLO over the last year alone, and the unemployed workforce is used in Russia for orchestrating artificial competition.
Russia continues its gradual depopulation of the occupied Donbas by relocating the region’s working-age inhabitants under the Kremlin’s state program to Russia’s problem regions for fixing local demography issues there. Meanwhile, the opposite process has been running full steam in occupied Crimea, where Russia keeps relocating its citizens in order to change the peninsula’s ethnic composition. For now, according to experts, one-third of the Crimean population is Russian migrants.
Further reading:
- Ukraine’s economic losses due to Russian occupation of Donbas
- The struggle to prevent an environmental catastophe in war-torn Donbas
- Ukraine’s New York: child of a tragic love story of European industrialists and Donbas
- Wave of strikes sweeps over occupied Donbas as coal mines are shut down
- Donbas on the brink of environmental catastrophe
- Fears of radioactive disaster as Russian proxies plan to flood nuclear test site in Donbas (2018)
- Coal from occupied Donbas is being sold to Poland – media (2017)
- What assets did Russia’s puppet republics seize from Ukraine? Full list (2017)
