A coal mining company in eastern Ukraine experienced a severe staffing shortage after over a thousand of its employees left to fight Russia’s invasion. It responded by granting women the first-ever underground employment permit in its history.
More than one hundred accepted the offer.
Krystyna, 22, stated, “I took this job because there were no other jobs because the war started.”
She has been employed for five months as a technician at a depth of 470 meters (1,542 feet) to maintain the small electric trains that transport laborers over 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the lift shaft to the coal seams.
The mine protrudes against the flat terrain and the gloomy November weather. It is a massive tower with shafts that extend more than 600 meters below the surface.
The management of the mine asked Reuters not to reveal the precise location of the mine or use the surnames of the people who were interviewed for security reasons.
It was only after conquering her fear of leaving her four-year-old son, Denys, at home with her mother that Krystyna decided to accept the job. Despite being 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the front, her hometown of Pavlohrad is frequently struck by Russian missiles.
She claimed that although the work is interesting, it is challenging because of the heavy battery lids and sometimes unpleasant steam.
Her dear brother was employed in the same mine. Two weeks after the full-scale invasion began, he enlisted in the army, Krystyna said, adding that she is really concerned about him.
“Our boys were taken to the front, and now we need to support them: there is no one else to work in the mine now.”
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s coal industry—once among the biggest in Europe—has seen decades of decline. It provided a centrally managed internal market that vanished overnight.
In 2014, many coal-rich regions of eastern Ukraine were taken over by militias backed by Russia. Russia took over additional mines following the 2022 invasion.
Nearly 3,000 of the 20,000 mineworkers employed by DTEK, the mine’s owner and the biggest private energy company in Ukraine, are engaged in fighting.
Forty-two miners have lost their lives out of the thousand that fought at this mine and its twin enterprise nearby.
Despite the fact that some women had worked in mines prior to the war, the government had prohibited them from working underground because it believed the work to be too physically taxing. This policy had been in place since the Soviet era.
Approximately 400 women currently work underground at DTEK’s mines following the repeal of that ban during the war, albeit that still only makes up 2.5% of the entire subterranean workforce.
The company claims that women only work in non-physically demanding auxiliary underground jobs.
Unless it’s something really heavy that we can’t lift, we do everything on the same level as the men,” 43-year-old Natalia, a technician who also inspects the trains, said.
Prior to the closure of Ukrainian businesses amid the initial shock of the invasion, she held a job selling electronics, but she lost it.
Her son, 19, had already worked for a year in a nearby mine when Natalia made the decision to work in the mine.
She recalled, “Actually, I had been convincing him not to go and work there,” but her plan was to stay in the mine after the war, she said, adding that she was now content with her job.
