The companies 'Impex-Don' and 'Trading House 'Don Coal'', which leased 15 mines in 2024 in the territories of the self-proclaimed 'LPR' and 'DPR', abandoned nine objects, reports RBC citing sources. The reason is the unprofitability of the mines at current world coal prices and high costs.
The relevant ministries of the so-called 'DPR' and 'LPR' have been instructed to prepare a feasibility study on the advisability of transferring coal mines to the regions with the determination of the 'cost of maintaining the mines within their restructuring until final liquidation', the document says.
According to a source of the publication, the development of a technical project costs about 50 million rubles, maintaining the life support of one mine takes 20–30 million rubles per month, or 240–360 million rubles per year. The development of the project can take up to a year. Thus, over the course of a year, investors will be forced to spend a total of 2–3 billion rubles on supporting the objects.
Government representatives stated that neither the federal nor regional budgets provide funds for these works, and believe that the work and maintenance of the mines should be paid for by the subsoil user, notes RBC. Investors insist that they held a temporary lease license, which they took for a year to determine the prospects for developing the acquired mines, and therefore are not considered subsoil users. Moreover, they have already paid billions of rubles in wages to workers and for the reconstruction of objects over the year of the lease.
In the fall of 2014, the first deputy minister of the Ministry of Energy and Coal of Ukraine, Yuriy Zukov, said that before the start of the military conflict in 2014, 95 mines were operating in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on their territory. The Ministry of Energy of Russia in 2023 stated that there were 114 mines, some of which were in conservation or in the process of liquidation. At that time, he announced that 15 mines should remain in these regions.