Its towering chimneys once spewed clouds of steam. In the huge engine room, the turbines spin day and night. The furnace burned a truckload of coal.
During the Soviet era, the Kulakhov heating power plant spawned the towns around it in eastern Ukraine, boosting the local economy and keeping communities afloat with wages and home heating.
“Our factory is the heart of our city,” said retiree Halyna Liubchenko, whose husband spent his entire career working in the nearby coal mines that provide electricity to the plant.
That heart barely beats now, partially destroyed by gunfire. The factory is one of the last still operating in Ukraine’s Donbass region, once the country’s center for heavy industry and now the focus of Russia’s ground offensive that is ravaging frontline towns.
The war in eastern Ukraine has killed tens of thousands of people, reduced cities to rubble and displaced millions. It also nearly destroyed factories that had been an important driver of Ukraine’s economy for years.
The Donbas region’s steel industry has now been completely destroyed this year after a major factory producing coking coal, which is burned in blast furnaces to grind iron ore into steel, was destroyed. Other industries – such as those producing chemicals, machinery and fertilizers – have been severely degraded.
The factories once defined the region’s identity, and their post-Soviet decline set the stage for Russia to exploit the economic grievances of miners and factory workers in eastern Ukraine.
In 2013, the year before Russia began its military intervention in the east, mines and factories in the Donbas region earned $28 billion, accounting for 15% of the country’s economic output.
But two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the factories Russia promised to revive in the region are in ruins. According to the Ukrainian Employers’ Confederation, an industry group, nine of the country’s 15 steel plants have been destroyed or closed in Russia. “Losing all this is very painful for the country,” said Dmytro Oliynyk, the organization’s director.
The region’s coal mines, steel and chemical plants also played a strategic role in the war, which prolonged urban fighting for months as Ukrainian forces used them as fortresses. In three striking examples, they served as last resort defenses when the city was captured by the Russians.
In 2022, when the war began, the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol Their final stop at the Azovstar Steel Plant And persisted for more than two months. The standoff ended when Ukrainian soldiers were surrounded and ran out of ammunition. More than 2,500 soldiers surrendered.
In the summer of 2022, before the city of Siviye Donetsk fell, Ukrainian forces fought similar battles between pipes and machinery at a giant ammonia plant in the city.
This year, Donbas industry reached a turning point Avdiivka coking coal plant destroyed, the largest in Europe. With its dense network of tunnels, multiple bomb shelters, and underground water and electricity supplies, the plant became a bastion for Ukrainian soldiers to seize the city’s final northern edge. They finally quit in February.
Kulakhov, about six miles from the front, was the latest factory-only town to become a prime target for Russian artillery. There was no sign during a recent visit that Ukrainian forces had taken up positions at the plant, but Russian forces have attacked the plant and other power plants in recent months in an attempt to cripple Ukraine’s energy network.
The factory has been hit by artillery and rockets 48 times this year, according to its director, Anatoly Borychevsky. Workers scrambled to weld burst pipes and place plywood over windows. But as the front line drew closer, repair efforts began to prove futile.
“As soon as the smoke comes out of the pipes, they’re going to hit us again,” Mr. Borichevsky said.
The Donbass (or Donetsk Basin) is named for the coal-rich underground basin that spurred an industrial boom in the 19th century that lasted into the Soviet period.
Welsh investor John Hughes founded the regional center, now called Donetsk but originally named Hughes Town, or Yuzivka in Ukrainian Yuzivka).
In the towns that sprang up around the mines and factories, migrant laborers from western Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere in the Muscovite Empire turned to Russian as the lingua franca, while surrounding villages continued to speak Ukrainian. Russia justified its sweeping invasion two years ago in part by claiming without evidence that Ukraine was cracking down on Russian-speakers in eastern towns.
In the post-Soviet era, Russia has used propaganda to stoke dissatisfaction with factory closings and falling wages in the Rust Belt region of Kiev and blame the Ukrainian government for its economic woes. When Russia called on eastern Ukrainians to revolt and join Russia, it promised to revive the region’s industry—even though Russia’s own single-factory towns suffered from similar social and economic ills as Ukraine’s.
“Now, no matter who controls this territory, it is unimaginable that the industry can recover,” said Pavlo Kazharin, author of “The Wild West of Eastern Europe,” a book about Russian interference in Ukraine.
“There’s no reason to bring it back from the ashes,” he said. Of these factories, he added, “They are obsolete before they are destroyed.”
Avdiivka, like Kulakhov, is a town with only factories. As a batch of coking coal cools after being refined, a towering, fluffy white cloud often rises over the city, visible to anyone near the rolling farmland surrounding the city.
Tetiana Nikonova, 50, has worked at the factory since 1993, delivering mail between distant offices and workshops. Traveling across the factory grounds meant walking several miles each day through steam and coal dust, an indication of the massive scale of the plant. Like other factories in the region, it is an example of the gigantic principle of Soviet industrial design.
During the Battle of Avdievka, the factory was targeted by air-dropped glide bombs, a new weapon in Russia’s arsenal. They severely damaged the machine. The closure of the plant, which follows the destruction of the Mariupol steel plant two years ago, has completely devastated eastern Ukraine’s steel industry. The six steel plants still operating in Ukraine are located outside the Donbass region.
Economists note that the damage is not a pure disaster for Ukraine’s overall economy. The mines have continued to operate with subsidies as a way to provide employment. Serhiy Fursa, deputy director at Kyiv-based investment firm Dragon Capital, said the Russian army was “acting like Margaret Thatcher in Britain 30 years ago” in shutting down the subsidized coal industry. .
“Most of these factories are not profitable,” he said. “Russia — sorry for your cynicism — helped Ukraine shut them down.”
Agriculture and information technology outsourcing have become more promising industries in Ukraine over the past decade.
The steel mills became profitable. For example, the Azovstal factory was a major exporter and generated approximately 4% of Ukraine’s total foreign exchange earnings before the war. The disruption worsened Ukraine’s trade deficit.
However, Fossa said it was an inefficient plant that added little value to its iron ore and coking coal production.
In Kulakhov, the power plant still employs about 600 people, giving the town’s remaining residents a reason to stay put even as Russian troops move through the eastern villages. Mayor Roman Padun said only about 4,000 of the pre-war population of 21,000 residents remain. He said shelling of the town and surrounding villages had killed 63 civilians and wounded 268 others since the invasion.
At the factory, Russian artillery destroyed machinery, electrical wiring, and tanks for cooling water and fuel. Water drips from broken pipes. Downed power lines lay across the road. Factory director Borichevsky said if Russian troops seized the factory, they would be unlikely to repair it.
Dmytro Pashenko, the plant’s foreman who has worked there for most of his career, said heavy industry had sustained communities in eastern Ukraine for years.
“Without industry,” he said, “Donbas will perish.”
Alexander Chubuko Contributed reporting.
