Its towering chimneys once belched clouds of steam. In giant engine rooms, turbines rotate day and night. Furnaces burn coal trains.
In Soviet times, the Kurakhove Power and Heating Plant grew into the town around it in eastern Ukraine, boosting the local economy and sustaining the community with wages and heating of homes.
“Our factory is the heart of the city,” said Halyna Liubchenko, a retiree whose husband worked his entire career in the nearby coal mines that power the facility.
That heart is now almost no longer beating, partly destroyed by artillery. The factory is one of the last still operating in Ukraine's Donbas region, once the country's center of heavy industry and now the focus of Russian ground attacks that are devastating towns and cities along the front line.
The war in eastern Ukraine has killed tens of thousands of people, reduced cities to rubble and displaced millions. It also destroyed all the factories and plants that were important drivers of the Ukrainian economy for many years.
With the destruction this year of a large coke factory that grinds iron ore into steel in blast furnaces, the Donbas region's steel industry has now been completely destroyed. Other industries – such as chemical, machinery and fertilizer manufacturing – have suffered significant declines.
These factories once defined the region's identity, and their decline in the post-Soviet era laid the groundwork for Russia to exploit the economic discontent of miners and factory workers in Eastern Ukraine. .
In 2013, a year before Russia began its military intervention in the East, mines and factories in the Donbas region raked in $28 billion, accounting for 15% of the country's economic output.
But two years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the factories that Russia promised to restore in the region are now in ruins. According to the Ukrainian Federation of Employers, an industrial group, nine of the country's 15 steel mills have been destroyed or closed due to Russian production lines. “It's painful for the country to lose everything,” said Dmytro Oliynyk, the group's director.
The region's coal mines, steel and chemical plants also played a strategic role in the war, prolonging urban battles for months as the Ukrainian army used them as fortresses; In three prominent cases, they served as last-ditch defenses when cities were overrun by the Russians.
In the southeastern city of Mariupol, at the beginning of the war, in 2022, the Ukrainians made Their last stand was at the Azovstal steel plant and kept it for more than two months. The conflict ended when Ukrainian soldiers were surrounded and ran out of ammunition; More than 2,500 soldiers surrendered.
The Ukrainian army similarly fought among pipes and machinery in a giant ammonia factory in Sievierodonetsk before the city fell in the summer of 2022.
A breakthrough for the Donbas industry came this year with the destruction of the Avdiivka coke plant, the largest in Europe. With countless tunnels, multiple bomb shelters, underground water sources and power sources, the factory became a fortress for Ukrainian soldiers who held the last northern edge of the city until they finally withdrew in February.
Kurakhove, about six miles from the front line, is the newest single-factory town, which has become a major target for Russian artillery. During the recent visit, there was no indication that Ukrainian troops had taken positions in the plant, but Russian forces have attacked the plant in recent months, along with other power generators. , as they seek to degrade Ukraine's energy grid.
According to director Anatoly Borychevsky, the factory has been attacked by artillery and rockets 48 times this year. Workers scrambled to weld broken pipes and put plywood on windows. But as the front line drew closer and closer, repairs began to become futile.
“As soon as the smoke came out of the pipe, they attacked us again,” Mr. Borychevsky said.
Donbas – or the Donetsk basin – is named after the rich underground coal basin that fueled an industrial boom from the 19th century that lasted into the Soviet era.
A Welsh investor, John Hughes, founded the regional center, now known as Donetsk but originally named Hughes Town, or Yuzivka in Ukrainian.
In the towns that sprang up around mines and factories, immigrant workers from western Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere in the Moscow empire turned to Russian as a lingua franca, while The surrounding villages continued to speak Ukrainian. Russia justified its full-scale invasion two years ago in part by asserting without evidence that Ukraine was oppressing Russian speakers in eastern towns.
In the post-Soviet era, Russia has used propaganda to stoke anger against Kyiv for factory closures and wage cuts in the rust-belt region, blaming the Ukrainian government. about economic difficulties. When Russia called on the people of eastern Ukraine to rise up and join Russia, it promised to restore industry in the region – regardless of Russia's single-factory towns suffering from economic ills and society similar to that in Ukraine.
“Now, no matter who controls the territory, it is impossible to imagine this industry,” said Pavlo Kazarin, author of a book about Russia's intervention in Ukraine, “Eastern Europe's Wild West,” will be restored.”
“There's no reason to bring it back from the ashes,” he said. He added of the factories, “Before they were demolished, they were obsolete.”
Avdiivka, like Kurakhove, is a one-factory town. A towering, fluffy white cloud regularly rises above the city as a batch of coke cools after refining, visible to anyone who comes close in the farm fields surrounding it.
Tetiana Nikonova, 50, has worked at the factory since 1993, transporting mail between distant offices and stores. Crossing the plant grounds meant walking several miles each day, through steam and coal dust, a sign of the plant's vast scale. As with other factories in the area, it is an example of massive Soviet industrial design principles.
During the Battle of Avdiivka, the factory became the target of air-dropped glide bombs, a new weapon in Russia's arsenal. They seriously damage the machinery. The plant's collapse completed the wipeout of the steel industry in eastern Ukraine, following the destruction of the Mariupol steelworks two years ago. Ukraine's six still operating steel mills are located outside the Donbas region.
Economists have noted that for the entire Ukrainian economy, this loss is not a complete disaster. Mines are kept open with subsidies as a way to create jobs. Serhiy Fursa, deputy director of Dragon Capital, an investment firm in Kyiv, said the Russian military was “behaving like Margaret Thatcher in Britain 30 years ago” by shutting down the subsidized coal industry.
“Most of these factories are not profitable,” he said. “Russia — sorry for the skepticism — helped Ukraine shut them down.”
Over the past decade, agriculture and IT outsourcing have emerged as more promising sectors for Ukraine.
Steel mills are profitable. For example, the Azovstal factory was once a major exporter, generating about 4% of Ukraine's total foreign exchange earnings before the war. The destruction has worsened Ukraine's trade deficit.
However, Mr. Fursa said this is an inefficient plant and the added value for the production of iron ore and coking coal is very low.
In Kurakhove, the power station still employed about 600 people, giving the town's last remaining residents a reason to stay even as Russian forces advanced through the villages immediately to the east. Mayor Roman Padun said there are still about 4,000 residents, from a pre-war population of about 21,000. Since the invasion, artillery attacks have killed 63 civilians and wounded 268 others in the town and surrounding villages, he said.
At the plant, Russian artillery cut out machinery, power lines and tanks containing coolant and fuel. Water dripped from broken pipes. Broken electric wires lie across the roads. If Russian forces capture the factory, it is unlikely they will be able to repair it, said Mr. Borychevsky, the director.
Dmytro Pashenko, a factory foreman who worked there for most of his career, said heavy industry had supported the eastern Ukrainian community for many years.
“Without industry,” he said, “Donbas will die.”
Oleksandr Chubko Report contributions.
